Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Da,Stepan,” the prisoners chorused. They sounded resigned. They were resigned, the ones who’d been in thegulags since 1937 or even longer more so than new fish like Nussboym. Even the regular camp ration wasn’t enough to keep a man strong. If they cut it because you didn’t meet your norm, pretty soon they’d throw you in the snow, to keep till the ground got soft enough for them to bury you.

  Anton Mikhailov grunted. “And if we work like a pack of Stakhanovites, we starve then, too.”

  “Which ismeshuggeh,” Nussboym said. You did get your bread ration increased if you overfulfilled your quota; Mikhailov was right about that. But you didn’t come close to getting enough extra to make up for the labor you had to expend to achieve that overfulfillment. Coming close enough to quota to earn regular rations was hard enough. Six and a half cubic yards of wood per man per day. Wood had been something Nussboym took for granted when he was burning it. Producing it was something else again.

  “You talk like azhid, zhid,” Mikhailov said. Above the face cloth he wore to keep his nose and mouth from freezing, his gray eyes twinkled. Nussboym shrugged. Like Fyodorov, Mikhailov spoke without much malice.

  Snow drifted around treetrunks, high as a man’s chest. Nussboym and Mikhailov stomped it down with theirvalenki. Without the thick felt boots, Nussboym’s feet would have frozen off in short order. If you didn’t have decent boots, you couldn’t do anything. Even the NKVD guards understood that much. They didn’t want to kill you right away: they wanted to get work out of you first.

  Once they got the snow down below their knees, they attacked the pine with their axes. Nussboym had never chopped down a tree in his life till he landed in Karelia; if he never chopped down another one, that would suit him fine. No one cared what he thought, of course. If he didn’t chop wood, they’d dispose of him without hesitation and without remorse.

  He was still awkward at the work. The cotton-padded mittens he wore didn’t help with that, although, like thevalenki, they did keep him from freezing as he worked. Even without them, though, he feared the axe would still have turned every so often in his inexpert hands, so that he hit the trunk with the flat of the blade rather than the edge. Whenever he did it, it jolted him all the way up to the shoulder; the axe handle might have been possessed by a swarm of bees.

  “Clumsy fool!” Mikhailov shouted at him from the far side of the pine. Then he did it himself and jumped up and down in the snow, howling curses. Nussboym was rude enough to laugh out loud.

  The tree began to sway and groan as their cuts drew nearer each other. Then, all at once, it toppled. “Look out!” they both yelled, to warn the rest of the gang to get out of the way. If the pine fell on the guards, too damn bad, but they scattered, too. The thick snow muffled the noise of the pine’s fall, although several branches, heavy with ice, snapped off with reports like gunshots.

  Mikhailov clapped his mittened hands together. Nussboym let out a whoop of glee. “Less work for us!” they exclaimed together. They’d have to trim the branches from the tree; any that broke off of their own accord made life easier. In thegulag, not much did that.

  What they still had left to trim was quite bad enough. Finding where the branches were wasn’t easy in the snow, lopping them off wasn’t easy, dragging them through the soft powder to the pile where everybody was stacking branches was plenty to make your heart think it would burst.

  “Good luck,” Nussboym said. The parts of him exposed to the air were frozen. Under his padded jacket and trousers, though, he was wet with sweat. He pointed to the snow still clinging to the green, sap-filled wood of the pine boughs. “How can you burn those in this weather?”

  “Mostly you don’t,” the otherzek answered. “Used to be you’d just get them to smoke for a while so the guards would be happy and say you’d fulfilled your norm there. But the Lizards have a habit of bombing when they spot smoke, so now we don’t do that any more.”

  Nussboym didn’t mind standing around and talking, but he didn’t want to stiffen up, either. “Come on, let’s get a saw,” he said. “The quicker we are, the better the chance for a good one.”

  The best saw had red-painted handles. It was there for the taking, but Nussboym and Mikhailov left it alone. That was the saw Stepan Rudzutak and the assistant gang boss, a Kazakh named Usmanov, would use. Nussboym grabbed another one he remembered as being pretty good. Mikhailov nodded approval. They carried the saw over to the fallen tree.

  Back and forth, back and forth, bend a little more as the cut got deeper, make sure you jerk your foot out of the way so the round of wood doesn’t mash your toe. Then move down the trunk a third of a meter and do it again. Then again, and again. After a while, you might as well be a piston in a machine. The work left you too busy and too worn for thought.

  “Break for lunch!” Rudzutak shouted. Nussboym looked up in dull amazement. Was half the day gone already? The cooks’ helpers were grumbling at having to leave the nice warm kitchens and come out to feed the work gangs too far away to come in, and they were yelling at thezeks to hurry up and feed their ugly faces so these precious, delicate souls could get back in away from the chill.

  Some of the men in the work gang screamed abuse at the cooks’ helpers. Nussboym watched Rudzutak roll his eyes. He was a new fish here, but he’d learned better than that in the Lodz ghetto. Turning to Mikhailov, he said, “Only a fool insults a man who’s going to feed him.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you look after all,” the Russian answered. He ate his soup-it wasn’tshchi this time, but some vile brew of nettles and other weeds-in a hurry, to get whatever vestigial warmth remained, then took a couple of bites out of his chunk of bread and stuck the rest back in the pocket of his trousers.

  Nussboym ate all his bread. When he got up to go back to his saw, he found he’d gone stiff. That happened every day, near enough. A few minutes at the saw cured it. Back and forth, back and forth, bend lower, jerk your foot, move down the trunk-His mind retreated. When Rudzutak yelled for the gang to knock off for the day, he had to look around to see how much wood he’d cut. Plenty to make quota for him and Mikhailov-and the rest of the gang had done fine, too. They loaded the wood onto sledges and dragged it back toward the camp. A couple of guards rode with the wood. Thezeks didn’t say a word. It would have been their necks if they had.

  “Maybe they’ll mix some herring in with the kasha tonight,” Mikhailov said. Nussboym nodded as he trudged along. It was something to look forward to, anyhow.

  Someone knocked on the door to Liu Han’s little chamber in the Peking roominghouse. Her heart leaped within her. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been out of the city for a long time, what with one thing and another. She knew he’d been dickering with the Japanese, which revolted her, but she hadn’t been able to argue him out of it before he left. He put what he thought of as military necessity before anything else, even her.

  He was honest about it, at any rate. Given that, she could accept that he wouldn’t yield to her, and yet go on caring about him. Most men, from all she’d seen, would promise you they’d never do something, go ahead and do it anyway, and then either deny that they’d promised or that they’d done it or both.Usually both, she thought with a curl of her lip.

  The knock came again, louder and more insistent. She scrambled to her feet. If Nieh was knocking like that, maybe he hadn’t bedded down with the first singsong girl he’d seen after his prong got heavy. If so, that spoke well for him-and meant she ought to be extra grateful now.

  Smiling, she hurried to the door, lifted the bar, and opened it wide. But it wasn’t Nieh standing in the hall, it was his aide, Hsia Shou-Tao. The smile slid from her face; she made haste to stand straight like a soldier, abandoning the saucy tilt to her hip that she’d put on for Nieh.

  Too late. Hsia’s broad, ugly features twisted into a lecherous grin. “What a fine-looking woman you are!” he said, and spat on the floor of the hall. He never let anyone forget he was a peasant by birth, and took any slight trace of polite manners a
s a bourgeois affectation and probably the sign of counterrevolutionary thought.

  “What do you want?” Liu Han asked coldly. She knew the most probable answer to that, but she might have been wrong. There was at least a chance Hsia had come up here on Party business rather than in the hope of sliding his Proud Pestle into her Jade Gate.

  She didn’t stand aside to let him into the room, but he came in anyway. He was blocky and broad-shouldered and strong as a bullock-when he moved forward, he would walk right over you if you didn’t get out of his way. Still trying to keep his voice sweet, though, he said, “You did a fine job, helping to blow up the little scaly devils with those bombs in the gear the animal-show men used. That was clever, and I admit it.”

  “That was also a long time ago now,” Liu Han said. “Why pick this time to come and give me a compliment?”

  “Any time is a good time,” Hsia Shou-Tao answered. Casually, he kicked the door shut behind him. Liu Han knew exactly what that meant. She started to worry. Not many people were in the roominghouse in the middle of the afternoon. She wished she hadn’t opened the door. Hsia went on, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, do you know that?”

  Liu Han knew it only too well. She said, “I am not your woman. I am partnered to Nieh Ho-T’ing.” Maybe that would make him remember he had no business being up here sniffing after her. He did respect Nieh, and did do as Nieh ordered him-when those orders had nothing to do with women, at any rate.

  Hsia laughed. Liu Han did not think it was funny. Hsia said, “He is a good Communist, Nieh is. He will not mind sharing what he has.” With no more ado than that, he lunged at her.

  She tried to push him away. He laughed again-he was much stronger than she was. He bent his face down to hers. When he tried to kiss her, she tried to bite him. Without any visible show of anger, he slapped her in the face. His erection, big and thick, rammed against her hipbone. He shoved her down onto the thick pile of bedding in a corner of the room, got down beside her, and started puffing off her black cotton trousers.

  In pain, half stunned, for a moment she lay still and unresisting. Her mind flew back to the bad days aboard the little scaly devils’ airplane that never came down, when the little devils had brought men into her metal cell and they’d had their way with her, whether she wanted them or not. She was a woman; the scaly devils starved her if she did not give in; what could she do?

  Then, she’d been able to do nothing except yield. She’d been altogether in the little scaly devils’ power-and she’d been an ignorant peasant woman who knew no better than to do whatever was demanded of her.

  She wasn’t like that any more. Instead of fear and submission, what shot through her was rage so raw and red, she marveled it didn’t make her explode. Hsia Shou-Tao yanked her trousers off over her ankles and flung them against the wall. Then he pulled down his own, just halfway. The head of his organ, rampantly free of its foreskin, slapped Liu Han’s bare thigh.

  She brought up her knee and rammed it into his crotch as hard as she could.

  His eyes went wide and round as a foreign devil’s, with white all around the iris. He made a noise half groan, half scream, and folded up on himself like a pocketknife, his hands clutching the precious parts she’d wounded.

  If she gave him any chance to recover, he’d hurt her badly, maybe even kill her. Careless that she was naked from the waist down, she scrambled away from him, snatched a long sharp knife out of the bottom drawer of the chest by the window, and went back to touch the edge of the blade to his thick, bull-like neck.

  “You bitch, you whore, you-” He took one hand away from his injured privates to try to knock her aside.

  She bore down on the blade. Blood trickled from the cut. “Hold very still,Comrade,” she hissed, loading what should have been an honored title with every ounce of scorn she could. “If you think I wouldn’t like to see you dead, you’re even stupider than I give you credit for.”

  Hsia froze. Liu Han pressed the knife in a little deeper anyhow. “Careful,” he said in a tiny, strangled voice: the more he made his throat move, the more the knife cut him.

  “Why should I be careful?” she snarled. It was, she realized, a good question. The longer this tableau held, the better the odds Hsia Shou-Tao would find a way to turn the tables on her. Killing him now would make sure he didn’t. If she left him alive, she’d have to move fast, while he was still too shocked and in too much pain to think clearly. “Are you ever going to do that to me again?” she demanded.

  He started to shake his head, but that made the knife blade move in his flesh, too. “No,” he whispered.

  She started to ask if he would ever do such a thing to any other woman again, but changed her mind before the words crossed her lips. He would say no to that, too, but he would undoubtedly be lying. Thinking of one lie would make it easier for him to think of others. Instead, she said, “Get on your hands and knees-slowly. Don’t do anything to get yourself bled out like a pig.”

  He managed. He was awkward not just because of his battered testicles but also because his trousers were still in disarray, impeding his movement. That was one of the things Liu Han counted on: even if he wanted to grab her, having his pants around his ankles would slow him up.

  She took the knife away from his neck, stuck it in the small of the back. “Now crawl to the door,” she said. “If you think you can knock me down before I shove this all the way in, go ahead and try.”

  Hsia Shou-Tao crawled. At Liu Han’s order, he pulled the door open and crawled out into the hall. She thought about kicking him again as he left, but decided not to. After the humiliation from that, she would have to kill him. He hadn’t cared what humiliation he might visit on her, but she couldn’t afford to be so cavalier.

  She slammed the door after him, let the bar down with a thud. Only then, after it was over, did she start to shake. She looked down at the knife in her hand. She could never leave the room unarmed, not now. She couldn’t leave the knife in a drawer while she slept any more, either. It would have to stay in the bedding with her.

  She walked over, got her trousers, and started to put them back on. Then she paused and threw them down again. She took a scrap of rag, wet it in the pitcher on the chest of drawers, and used it to scrub at the spot where Hsia Shou-Tao’s penis had rubbed against her. Only after that was done did she get dressed.

  A couple of hours later, someone knocked on the door. Ice shot up Liu Han’s back. She grabbed the knife. “Who is it?” she asked, weapon in hand. She realized it might not do her any good. If Hsia had a pistol, he could shoot through the door and leave her dead or dying at no risk to himself.

  But the answer came quick and clear: “Nieh Ho-T’ing.” With a gasp of relief, she unbarred the door and let him in.

  “Oh, it’s so good to be back in Peking,” he exclaimed. But as he moved to embrace her, he saw the knife in her hand. “What’s this?” he asked, one eyebrow rising.

  What it was seemed obvious. As for why it was-Liu Han had thought she’d be able to keep silent about Hsia’s attack, but at the first question the tale poured forth. Nieh listened impassively; he kept silent, except for a couple of questions to guide her along, till she was through.

  “What do we do about this man?” Liu Han demanded. “I know I am not the first woman he has done this to. From the men in my village, I would have expected nothing different. Is the People’s Liberation Army run like my village, though? You say no. Do you mean it?”

  “I do not think Hsia will bother you again, not that way,” Nieh said. “If he did, he would be a bigger fool than I know him to be.”

  “It is not enough,” Liu Han said. The memory of Hsia Shou-Tao tearing at her clothing brought almost as much fury as had the actual assault. “It’s not me alone-he needs to be punished so he never does this to anyone.”

  “The only sure way to manage that is to purge him, and the cause needs him, even if he is not the perfect man for it,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. He held up a hand
to forestall Liu Han’s irate reply. “We shall see what revolutionary justice can accomplish. Come down to the meeting of the executive committee tonight.” He paused thoughtfully. “That will also be a way of getting your views heard there more often. You are a very sensible woman. Perhaps you will be a member before too long.”

  “I will come,” Liu Han said, concealing her satisfaction. She had come before the executive committee before, when she was advocating and refining her plan for bombing the little scaly devils at their feasts. She hadn’t been invited back-till now. Maybe Nieh had ambitions of using her as his puppet. She had ambitions of her own.

  Much of the business of the executive committee proved stupefyingly dull. She held boredom at bay by glaring across the table at Hsia Shou-Tao. He would not meet her eye, which emboldened her to glare more fiercely.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing ran the meeting in ruthlessly efficient style. After the committee agreed to liquidate two merchants known to be passing information to the little devils (and also known to be backers of the Kuomintang) he said, “It is unfortunate but true that we of the People’s Liberation Army are ourselves creatures of flesh and blood, and all too fallible. Comrade Hsia has provided us with the latest example of such frailty. Comrade?” He looked toward Hsia Shou-Tao like-the comparison that sprang to Liu Han’s mind waslike a landlord who’s caught a peasant cheating him out of his rents.

  Like that guilty peasant, Hsia looked down, not at his accuser. “Forgive me, Comrades,” he mumbled. “I confess I have failed myself, failed the People’s Liberation Army, failed the Party, and failed the revolutionary movement. Because of my lust, I tried to molest the loyal and faithful follower in the revolutionary footsteps of Mao Tse-Tung, our soldier Liu Han.”

  The self-criticism went on for some time. Hsia Shou-Tao told in humiliating detail how he had made advances to Liu Han, how she rebuffed him, how he tried to force her, and how she defended herself.