Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’m a Russian White,” Vasili reminded her. “The Reds have been calling us traitors since long before they got around to you people.”

  “Don’t say ‘you people,’ ” Eva told him. “You’re one of us now. You’d better be, if you don’t want the MGB to grab you.”

  “Nobody wants the MGB to grab him. Or even her.” Vasili spoke with great conviction. Ewa didn’t try to tell him he was wrong.

  A military band followed the soldiers. They blared out the Polish national anthem. It was called “Poland Is Not Yet Lost,” which said everything that needed saying about the country’s luckless past and limited hopes for the future.

  Vasili had limited hopes for the future himself. As long as he stayed out of the Chekists’ clutches, he’d be happy enough. He wasn’t really a Pole, of course, no matter what Ewa said. But if the choice was between pretending to be a Pole and pretending to be a Red Russian, he knew which he preferred.

  “Do you want to go hear the speeches?” Ewa asked.

  “Christ have mercy, no!” Vasili exclaimed. She burst out laughing. He didn’t think it was funny. Political speeches were dismal enough even in one’s native language. When you had to listen to them in a tongue that wasn’t yours, they got even worse.

  Besides, he already knew what the hacks in the square-cut suits would say. They’d talk about punishing the people at the heart of the uprising, and about how all the other Poles could get on with their lives…as long as they imitated their boss and did exactly what the Russians told them to. If you’d read the script ahead of time, did you need to see the movie?

  He had nowhere left to run, either. He’d fled Red China for the Soviet Union. When the Russians gave him the choice between the gulag and the Red Army, he’d chosen the Army without hesitation. He’d guessed it would be easier to escape from, and he’d been right. When the Polish rebels captured him, he’d wholeheartedly gone over to them.

  And here he was, still in Poland, which was not—quite—lost yet. Only it survived as a Communist country like the two he’d already found he didn’t want to live in. Poland was bordered by the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. The Reds held them down, too. No, nowhere left to run.

  Or was there? He turned to Ewa. “If we could get up to the Baltic and if we could get a boat some way, we could sail to Finland or Sweden or maybe even Denmark or West Germany.”

  She looked at him. He didn’t like what he saw in her eyes. “Those are two pretty big ifs,” she said. “Besides, have you got any idea how to sail a boat?”

  “Well, no,” he admitted. The only time he could remember even being in a boat was when that drunken Russian fisherman rowed him across the Amur, out of China and into the USSR. That hadn’t worked out as well as he wished it would have.

  “Let’s sum this up, then.” Ewa ticked off points on her fingers as she made them. “We can’t get to the Baltic—they’ll probably be extra careful about letting anybody out of Warsaw for a while. Even if we could get to the Baltic, I don’t see how we can buy a boat or steal one. And if by some miracle we did get our hands on a boat, we don’t know how to use it. Is that it, or did I miss something?”

  “That’s it, all right,” Vasili said sullenly. He looked around to make sure nobody was spying on them. He’d learned that when the Japanese still lorded it over Harbin. He hadn’t even needed Communism to teach it to him. Satisfied, he went on, “I don’t know if I can stand staying here.”

  “I understand that.” The pharmacist’s daughter spoke with exaggerated patience. “But if you don’t stay here, you’re likeliest to go straight into the gulag. I’d miss you…unless I went in at the same time, which isn’t that unlikely, either. If they grab you, chances are they’ll grab me, too.”

  He heard only a tiny fragment of what she actually said. “You’d miss me, Ewa? Would you really?”

  “I said so, didn’t I? You’ve known me for a while now. You know I don’t usually say things I don’t—”

  She didn’t get to finish. Vasili put his arms around her, tilted her chin up, and kissed her for all he was worth. She stiffened in surprise. She let out a muffled squawk, too. A moment later, though, she melted against him and kissed him back.

  Vasili didn’t want the moment ever to end. He clung to Ewa like a drowning man clinging to an oar. When he opened his eyes in the middle of the kiss, he almost fell into hers, which were also open and only a few centimeters from his. At last, though, she tapped him on the arm, more and more insistently. With vast reluctance, he drew back a little. “What?” he said.

  “I couldn’t breathe,” she told him.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” he said. Then he kissed her again. Or maybe she kissed him this time. He never could sort it out afterwards. This kiss didn’t go on so long, because one of the other people who’d come out to watch the Communists reenter Warsaw broke into applause. That made Vasili and Ewa fly apart like two magnets with their north poles touching.

  “I think maybe we’d better get back to the shop,” Ewa said, smoothing her hair with one of those automatic gestures women used.

  “I think maybe you’re right.” Vasili started off that way. Ewa took a couple of quick steps to catch up with him, then walked along at his side. Their hands brushed, then clung. They’d just watched the uprising they’d worked so hard for crushed. They were both smiling all the same.

  When they rounded a corner, a hard-faced policeman held out his hand and said, “Your papers!”

  Ewa’s documents said she was someone named Maria Filemonowa. Vasili’s proclaimed him to be Leszek Piskorski. They were forgeries, but forgeries from the print shop that produced genuine identity cards. The policeman examined them, gave a grudging nod, and handed them back. He waved Vasili and Ewa on.

  “Just one of those things,” Ewa said while the Red bastard was still close enough to hear them. Vasili nodded. He didn’t want to talk within earshot of the policeman. His Russian accent would have betrayed him. He took Ewa’s hand again. All right, the uprising was dead. They weren’t, then. They still had lives to shape among the ruins.

  COLONEL VOLODYMYR PETLYURA WHACKED the atlas page with a pencil. He should have had a big map tacked to a wall or a table and used a pointer to show the bomber crew its target. Everything in the Soviet Union seemed to be improvised these days. But he managed to make do with what he had.

  “Riga,” he said. “Your target is Riga. We’re making progress, no two ways about it. The bandits in Poland and Czechoslovakia have gone belly-up. The Fascist retreads in Hungary won’t last one whole hell of a lot longer. Once we knock the rebels in the Baltics and the Caucasus over the head, we’ll be able to get on with our business without worrying about a stab in the back.”

  Boris Gribkov’s face showed only serious attention as he listened to the base commandant. None of the other flyers raised an eyebrow or let out a cough, either. Their impassive Soviet masks passed yet another test. But, behind his mask, Boris wondered whether Colonel Petlyura remembered Hitler wailing about the stab in the back that, he claimed, cost Germany the First World War.

  He wasn’t about to ask Petlyura any such question. Instead, he said, “Comrade Colonel, what kind of air defenses do the Latvians have around their capital?”

  “When Riga was under Soviet control, we installed comprehensive flak rings around the city to protect it against the imperialist aggressors,” the commandant replied. “They must have been successful—no A-bombs fell on Riga. Now, however, it’s likely that those flak rings are in the bandits’ hands.”

  “I see,” Boris said. Those would be flak guns that could reach up and hit American B-29s…or Soviet Tu-4s. Had they kept the enemy away from Riga, though, or had the Americans stayed away because they were soft on the Baltic republics and wanted to see them rise against the USSR? One more query it seemed better not to put to Colonel Petlyura.

  “We’ve been giving it to Riga pretty hard with medium bombers,” Petlyura said. “Same with Memel—or whatever the Lithuania
ns call it these days—and Tallinn. Now it’s time to get the heavies into the act.”

  “We aren’t bombing Vilnius?” Anton Presnyakov asked.

  “We hold Vilnius,” the base commandant answered, as proudly as if he’d captured it singlehanded.

  “Are the Lithuanian bandits flying night fighters?” Boris asked—the most important question to any bomber pilot.

  “It’s…possible.” Colonel Petlyura didn’t sound so proud of that admission. “But those are the chances of war. I got shot down over Kiev in 1943. Luckily, my ’chute blew me into a partisan-held area, so I stayed in the fight.”

  Getting shot down by the Luftwaffe was one thing. Getting shot down by Lithuanian bandits? That would be tragedy repeating as farce. Unless I get killed, Boris thought. Then it would be tragic all the way around.

  Night came early at this season of the year. In normal times, mothers and fathers would be telling kids about the presents Father Frost would give them. Now? Who could say? Gregorian Christmas soon, and New Year’s, and Orthodox Christmas. Officially, New Year’s would be the celebrated day. Actually? Again, who could say?

  The Tu-4 didn’t carry a full load—only about eight tonnes of bombs. Maybe that was intentional, to make takeoff easier. Maybe it just meant logistics had broken down and not enough ordnance had come to Mogilev to fill the plane’s bomb bay. Boris found another question he couldn’t ask.

  Up into the dark sky, up through the clouds, up to the edge of the stratosphere flew the big plane. It wore Soviet livery, with red stars and serial numbers. The Latvians wouldn’t be deceived by American emblems, though they’d confused the devil out of the Yankees themselves.

  They took antiaircraft fire from Daugavpils. That infuriated Gribkov. “The Red Army holds this place!” he raged. “Are we going to get shot down by stupid sons of bitches who happen to be our friends?”

  They didn’t. Those flak guns couldn’t reach high enough to touch them. The ones surrounding Riga…If anything, Colonel Petlyura had understated how many there were and what eager gunners they had. By the accuracy with which the fire came up at the Tu-4, the bandits knew how to integrate the guns with radar direction, too.

  “How soon can we bomb?” Boris demanded.

  “Another half a minute, Comrade Pilot,” Fyodor Ostrovsky replied.

  “Bozehmoi! This is worse than Bratislava,” Boris said. Considering that he’d been shot down over Bratislava…But, though the Tu-4 bucked in the air from near misses, nothing hit it before the bombs dropped away. Boris heeled the plane away from the Latvian capital with nothing but relief.

  Then the radarman let out a horrified, almost girlish squeal: “Bogies on the set! Two, closing fast!”

  That was the last thing in the world Boris wanted to hear. He turned hard to port and dove. As the Tu-4 shed altitude fast enough to make its wing spars groan, the radar-directed gun turrets started banging away. A hit or two from a 23mm shell would knock any fighter out of the sky. If they got lucky…

  But they didn’t. Machine-gun bullets chewed into the Tu-4. The bomber lost pressurization. “Oxygen masks!” Boris shouted. He and Presnyakov already wore theirs. So did Ostrovsky. Boris had to hope the rest of the crew were either using them or could get them on fast.

  More bullets bit the plane. So did cannon shells. One of the engines started to burn. Another quit, though without catching fire. The Tu-4 couldn’t stay airborne for long on two engines. And pretty soon bullets or shells would smash into the cockpit. That would be the end of that for everybody aboard.

  “Get out!” Boris shouted over the intercom, hoping it still worked. “We’re going down, so hit the silk!” He tried to lower the nose wheel with the hydraulics, but they were gone. He cranked it down instead. The bomb bay wouldn’t open without the hydraulics, either, so out through the wheel well was the only escape route for the men in and just aft of the cockpit.

  Out they went, one after another. Bitter cold smote Boris when his turn came. The air was thin but breathable, which showed how much height the Tu-4 had lost. He yanked the ripcord. The parachute opened with a jolt rough enough to make him gray out for a moment.

  Down through the clouds he fell. He could see fires in the distance when he got below the floating fog. That had to be Riga. The only trouble was, he wasn’t sure in which direction it lay. He thought—he hoped—it was north of him. If he was wrong, he’d splash into the Baltic and sink like a stone.

  He looked straight down past his flying boots. No, he wouldn’t have seen light coming out of windows on the sea. The ground wasn’t that far below, either. He gathered himself for a landing. It would happen when it happened; away from the lights, he couldn’t see much.

  That gathering proved pointless, because he crunched through much of the canopy of a big tree before winding up, like a hanging fruit, two or three meters in the air. “Fuck your mother!” he snarled at the tree. Then he took his knife off his belt and went to work on the lines that held him to the canopy.

  He’d cut only one before an electric torch blazed into his face from below. “Hold it right there!” a man barked in musically accented Russian. “Do you surrender? We’ve got you covered.”

  “I surrender,” Boris said, seeing no other choice. “Can I finish cutting myself down before I give you my knife?”

  “You’ll have a pistol, too,” the Latvian said. “Toss that down first.”

  Boris did. One of the man with the torch’s comrades went over and picked it up. Boris returned to hacking away at the nylon lines. When the last one parted, he balled himself up and fell. He hurt one ankle a little, but only a little. As he got to his feet, he looked at his captors. The big blond men wore Red Army tankmen’s coveralls, but among themselves they didn’t speak Russian.

  One of them took charge of Boris. “We’ll treat you as a prisoner of war,” he said. “You don’t do that for us, but we will for you. You can’t say we don’t play by the rules.”

  He wore rank badges that didn’t belong to the Red Army. Had the bandits revived the emblems Latvia used between the first two World Wars? Boris wouldn’t have recognized them if they hit him in the face. The rebel dropped back into Latvian to give his men orders. By his gestures, they amounted to Take him away.

  One of the other bandits saluted smartly. “Ja, Leitnants Eigims!” he said. He and his friends took Boris away.

  —

  That horrible noise wasn’t rockets screaming in from under a jet fighter’s wings. It was just Istvan Szolovits’ alarm clock, telling him to get up and get moving. He had to get moving to kill the damn thing. He’d put it on a shelf where he had to stand up to reach it. By the time it fell silent, he was irrevocably awake.

  He still felt sleepy, though. When you worked all day and went to night school afterwards, you came home tired. He slept like a dead thing on weekends; sometimes he didn’t wake up till after noon. The mere idea would have made the drill sergeants who tried to turn conscripts into Hungarian soldiers fall over and foam at the mouth from apoplexy.

  He was hungry all the time, too. He fixed bacon and eggs for breakfast, and gulped two big cups of pale coffee with them. The way he ate, he should have put on weight. He didn’t, though. His work clothes still fit fine.

  Then it was out to see if the Hudson would start. It was gloomy outside, and chilly by Los Angeles standards. The locals said it was in the low fifties. To Istvan, it felt like ten or eleven. Getting used to Fahrenheit degrees and pounds and gallons and miles and feet and other whimsical American measures was something he hadn’t thought he’d need to do. But he did—the sensible metric system was only a rumor here, and a distant rumor at that.

  The Hudson’s engine whirred and coughed. “Come on, you whore!” Istvan said. A moment later, it caught. You just have to know how to talk to it, he thought as smoke belched from the exhaust pipe.

  He was only about fifteen minutes away from Blue Front. He didn’t worry about the price of gasoline. The Hudson burned it as if it were going out
of style, but gas was so cheap in the USA that he hardly noticed. European cars were little and cramped, which helped them sip expensive fuel. Where fuel wasn’t expensive, cars were anything but little. Imperials and Lincolns dwarfed the Hudson.

  He pulled into the Blue Front lot a few minutes early. Aaron Finch was there ahead of him. Aaron was another one of those compulsively early people; from what he said, Ruth was even more so. The American had been about to go into the warehouse. He waited at the door, finishing a cigarette, while Istvan hurried over to catch up with him.

  “How’s it going?” Aaron asked.

  “I am doing all right. How about you?” Istvan said.

  “Can’t complain,” Aaron said. “And your English is really coming along. Except for where you rolled your r there, you sounded like you could’ve been born at Cedars of Lebanon.”

  “At where?” Istvan frowned at the name, which sounded Middle Eastern.

  “Sorry. It’s a big hospital. Leon was born there.”

  “Oh, I see. Thank you.”

  When they went inside, Herschel Weissman waited till they stuck their cards in the time clock. Once they’d punched in, he said, “How’d you guys like to take a TV and a washer down near Florence and Figueroa?”

  Istvan was ready to take anything anywhere. To his surprise, Aaron frowned. “That’s somewhere right near the edge of what the A-bomb knocked over,” he said.

  “That was two years ago, Aaron,” the founder of Blue Front said. “You won’t start growing tentacles out of your forehead or anything.”

  “Ikh vays, ikh vays.” Aaron sounded sheepish. Returning to English, he went on, “Whether I know it or not, though, I still get nervous. I must’ve hung around with Jim too long before I started working with Istvan.”

  Istvan drove the truck through downtown. Though the Pasadena Freeway and its southern extension, the Harbor, were fully repaired, much of downtown and the area south of it remained either ruins or cleared ground where ruins had stood. New houses weren’t sprouting on those vacant lots. “Would you want a house where an A-bomb knocked everything flat?” he said.