Feldman eyed him. “Were they all like you in Khabarovsk?” he asked—he’d found out where Vasili was supposed to have come from.
If that wasn’t a loaded question, though, Vasili had never heard one. “I got along,” he answered cautiously. “How come?”
“On account of if they were all like you over there, no wonder the American fuckers bombed the place,” the Jew said.
“I’d sooner work than sit around playing with my dick all the time.” Vasili’s father had smacked him whenever he dropped in some mat that he picked up from other Russian exiles in Harbin. The filthy dialect flourished here. His old man had said it sprang from the foul mouths of convicts and political prisoners. Convicts and political prisoners who’d served their stretches in the gulag made up a big part of the population here. Who else would want to, or could be made to, live in this part of the Soviet Union? No wonder mat grew like a weed in these parts.
By his cackle, Feldman could have been a laying hen. “You work too hard, sonny, somebody’s gonna kick you in the stones hard enough to smash ’em into gravel.”
“I don’t want trouble,” Vasili said: an understatement of epic proportions. “I just want to get by, same as I did there.”
“People in hell want cold water to drink, too,” the old Jew said. “That’s doesn’t mean they’re gonna get it. You keep doing like you’re doing, you’re the one who’s gonna get it—right in the neck.”
“What are you talking about?” Vasili didn’t get it now. He was behaving the way he would have back in Harbin. If you didn’t jump in there and outhustle the Chinese, they’d steal your lunch and eat it before you even knew it was gone. They worked hard all the time. They knew they had to. There were swarms of them, which made every one easily replaceable. Wasn’t it like that everywhere?
Evidently it wasn’t. Nikolai Feldman cackled some more. “What? I’ll tell you what. You make everybody in Smidovich look bad, that’s what. How many friends have you got here?”
Vasili hadn’t made any, or missed them. These weren’t the kind of people he wanted to get friendly with (well, except some of the pretty girls, but that wasn’t what Feldman meant). To him, they seemed like a bunch of lazy bums.
And the way they drank! The Russians in Harbin had put it away, but not like this. Vasili hadn’t believed some of the stories his old man told. Now he was starting to.
He had to say something. He tried “I’m only trying to get by” again.
“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not whining. I’ve got my smoking shed now, and that’s great. But people, ordinary people, they don’t love Stakhanovites. If you want to bust your balls, that means they got to bust theirs whether they want to or not. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you.” Vasili’d gone at top gear his whole life. In China, that was as automatic as breathing. Here? Maybe not.
A couple of days later, a burly bruiser named Grigory Papanin gave him the same message in almost the same words. “You piece of shit, you make me look like a chump,” said Papanin, who had been the number one handyman in Smidovich till Vasili got there. Unlike Vasili, he had friends—of about his own size. He also had a hatchet. One friend carried a crowbar, the other a meter’s worth of galvanized pipe.
A Chinese would have said You’re breaking my rice bowl. This also got the message across. Vasili just hoped they wouldn’t cripple him. (He also hoped his hand in his pocket would make them worry that he had a pistol. He wished like anything he did.)
“Khorosho,” he said. “I won’t make like a fucking Stakhanovite any more.” He showed his left hand, open in apology. The right stayed where it was. A straight razor wasn’t much, but it was all he was carrying.
He waited to see whether they would knock the crap out of him any which way. Three against one made bad odds. But they didn’t know what was in his pocket. They didn’t want to find out, either. Scowling, Papanin snarled, “You better not, cuntface, or you’ll be sorry.” He stomped off, his buddies in tow. Vasili didn’t sag with relief till after they’d gone around a corner.
—
Daisy Baxter felt giddy and guilty at the same time. She’d gone dancing with Bruce McNulty. Now, though the world was burning all around them, they headed for the seaside. It seemed a mad extravagance, especially since the Russians had hit the airfield at nearby Sculthorpe with ordinary bombs and visited atomic hell on Norwich, less than thirty miles east of Fakenham.
Mad extravagance or not, here she was, pedaling along on a bicycle next to the American bomber pilot. “But you’re from California!” she said. “The North Sea will seem like ice to you!”
“I’m from California, yeah, but I’m from San Francisco,” he said, and surprised her by laughing. “The way to bet is, the water in the Pacific there’ll be colder than it is here.”
“You’re pulling my leg!” she exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, looking at her in a way that made her cheeks heat and her heart race. But, shaking his head, he went on, “I’m not kidding, though. San Francisco’s foggy, and it can get chilly. And the ocean never warms up, not even in summertime.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. When she thought of California, she thought of Hollywood miles ahead of anything else. But running a distant second were oranges. She knew they needed hot weather to grow.
He must have picked the thought from her brain, because he said, “Sweetie, my state’s half again as big as your whole country. It’s got room for all kinds of stuff. Cities and mountains and deserts and beaches and farms and…well, like that.”
A state half again as big as the United Kingdom? And the USA had forty-eight states! California was a big one—Daisy knew that. Even so, was it any wonder the United States was top nation now, with Britain trundling along on its coattails? The wonder had to be that Britain had kept the lead as long as it had.
But that was visibly coming to an end. The two great wars were more than any nation was meant to endure. Britain had won them both, but all the bills were coming due at last. The empire was falling to pieces. India gone, Egypt and the rest of Africa restive…
“Mighty pretty countryside,” Bruce said. “Flatter than it is where I come from, but everything is so green!”
The land sloped gently down from Fakenham to Wells-next-the-Sea. Cattle and sheep grazed in the meadows. They didn’t even look up as the two humans pedaled by; they were used to that. A kestrel hung in the air above a field, looking for grasshoppers or mice or whatever else it could swoop down on and kill. They’d seen only a couple of autos since they set out. Petrol was rationed as tightly as it had been during the last war, and hideously dear even when you could get the coupons.
“It’s peaceful,” Daisy said.
“Yeah.” This time, Bruce’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. His job was destroying peace—and destroying places like this. After a moment, he went on, “It’s gonna heat up again. You didn’t hear that from me—I’ll call you a liar to your face if you say you did—but it is.”
She nodded. The news shocked her less than she wished it would have. With the way the Russians kept coming forward, how else could you stop them than by…dropping things on them? “How bad will it be?” Daisy asked after a hundred yards or so.
“Well, it won’t be good,” he said, and then it was his turn to ride along in silence for a little while. Finally, he went on, “You can hope that, when it’s all over, there’ll be enough people left to pick up the pieces.”
“And enough pieces left that are worth picking up?” Daisy asked.
He nodded. “Uh-huh. And that, too.” Perhaps to keep from having to say anything more, he deftly used one hand to take out a packet of Luckies, to put a cigarette in his mouth, to replace the packet, and to light the Lucky with a Zippo. The other hand stayed on the handlebars and kept the bike going straight.
Daisy made a small, needy noise. Bruce passed her the packet and the lighter. Her bicycle wobbled a little while she got the smoke going, but onl
y a little. She blew out a gray stream. “That’s very nice,” she said. “Smoother than the Navy Cuts I usually get.”
“Jesus, I hope so!” he said. “I’ve had some of those. You can file your teeth on the smoke from ’em.”
“Some people like them strong,” Daisy said. She didn’t herself, or not particularly; she bought Navy Cuts because they were cheap.
“You’ve got that right,” Bruce said. “One guy at Sculthorpe—one of your RAF fellas, not an American—smokes those, uh, darn Gauloises. God, but they’re foul! I think there’s something about them in the Geneva Convention rules against poison gas.”
Daisy nodded. “They’re poisonous, all right. The first few months after the war, demobbed soldiers would bring them into the pub. They’d clear out the snug faster than anything this side of a polecat.”
“We’d say ‘this side of a skunk,’ but you don’t have skunks over here, do you?” McNulty said.
She shook her head. “No. I saw one, though, at the Norwich zoo. A very neat black-and-white beast, about the size of a cat. It wasn’t doing much, not that I recall.”
“They mostly go around at night. If you leave them alone, they’ll do the same for you. If you don’t—watch out! You wouldn’t believe how much they stink.”
“I suppose not.” Remembering the Norwich zoo made Daisy remember that all the animals in it, including the handsome little skunk, were probably dead now. So were all their keepers. That was what happened, or a tiny bit of what happened, when an atom bomb ripped the heart out of a city.
She didn’t care to remember things like that. She concentrated on the unblemished countryside here instead. It was pretty when you concentrated on it instead of taking it for granted the way she usually did.
Pretty soon, they rolled through the twin villages of Great and Little Walsingham. Added together, they didn’t come close to a thousand people. Bruce McNulty exclaimed at some of the half-timbered houses. “Those things must have been here four or five hundred years!” he said.
“Of course.” She looked at him. “And so?”
He laughed. “It’s not of course to me. San Francisco wasn’t anything till a hundred and fifty years ago. It wasn’t a city till a hundred years ago. There’s nothing like this where I come from.”
“We must seem as strange to you as you do to us,” Daisy said.
“Now that you mention it, honey,” he answered, “yes.”
Wells-next-the-Sea lay another four miles north. It wasn’t quite next-the-sea, or even next to the sea. The harbor had silted up, so the little town lay a mile inland. A narrow-gauge railroad took people to the beach, though.
Daisy and Bruce didn’t have it to themselves, but it wasn’t crowded. They spread out towels and lay down on the soft yellow sand. A Royal Navy corvette went by not far from shore, fast enough to kick up a big white wake. “He’s got a bone in his teeth,” Bruce said. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
“That is what they say,” Daisy agreed. “Are you a naval personage, too?”
“Mm, I have a navel,” he said, and she made a face at him. More thoughtfully, he continued, “I wonder if he’s hunting a Russian sub or something.”
“Just what we need!” Daisy remembered how the U-boats had almost starved England into submission during the last war. There had been sinkings in the Atlantic and North Sea this time, but not nearly so many.
Gulls wheeled overhead, squawking shrilly. The sun was warm—not hot, but at least it wasn’t pouring rain. She enjoyed the company. Bruce put his arm around her. She enjoyed that, too. She wished the moment could last forever.
Then he leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back. It was her first real kiss, her first kiss that meant anything, since the end of 1944. She wondered how she’d ever gone so long without.
A CAR DOOR SLAMMED on the street in front of Aaron Finch’s little rented house in Glendale. He looked out the window to make sure, then nodded to himself. “They’re here, all right,” he said. “Such fun.” If he didn’t sound delighted, it was only because he wasn’t.
“Fun!” Leon said. Aaron’s son was just past two. He didn’t notice tones of voice very well yet.
Ruth Finch did. “You be nice—you hear me? I don’t want any trouble,” Aaron’s wife said.
“Hey, I don’t start trouble. That’s Marvin,” Aaron said, on the whole truthfully.
Truthful or not, he didn’t placate Ruth. “You may not start it, but you finish it,” she said. “That’s all you Finches.” She knew the family she’d married into, sure as hell.
The doorbell rang. Muttering under his breath about the family he’d married into, Aaron went to open it. Roxane Bauman was Ruth’s first cousin. Her husband, Howard, got enough work as an actor to keep food on his table but not enough to be a household name.
Or he had, before the war with the Russians started. His politics, and Roxane’s, weren’t just pink. They were Red, or as near as made no difference. He’d had to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Since then, and since the bombs started falling, people got much less eager to cast him.
Some of Aaron’s relatives owned similar politics. And Marvin had Hollywood connections, though he’d burned through most of them. Aaron was a Democrat, but he let it go at that.
Well, if Ruth had to put up with Marvin, he supposed he could smile at Roxane and Howard. Which he did. “Good to see you,” he said, waving them in. “What’s new?” Right then, he thought he was a better actor than Howard Bauman at his finest.
“Same old thing,” Howard said. He was good-looking in a not particularly Jewish way, and had a thick head of brown hair combed straight back. His nose—small and straight enough to make Aaron wonder if he’d had it fixed—twitched. “Something smells good.”
“It’s a tongue,” Ruth said. “The butcher had some nice ones.”
“Mother still makes them, too,” Roxane said. Her mother was Ruth’s mother’s younger sister. Unlike Ruth’s mother, Fanny Seraph—you couldn’t make up a name like that—was still alive. She spoke more Yiddish and Byelorussian than English, but she managed. And, considering everything that had happened, she was a hell of a lot better off here than she would have been in the Old Country.
By the way Roxane said it, though, only someone fresh off the boat would bother with Old Country food. But Howard said, “Hey, I love tongue.” That took the edge off it. How many square meals had he eaten lately? Not so many as he would have wanted, Aaron guessed.
“Can I get you a beer or fix you a drink?” he asked.
“Beer works,” Howard said. His wife shot him a startled look. So did Aaron; Bauman usually drank martinis, often in heroic doses. But he explained, “Beer goes with tongue.” Aaron had to nod—it did.
“Let me have a scotch on the rocks,” Roxane said.
Aaron made one for her and one for Ruth. He poured Burgies for Howard and himself. “Salt, Daddy! Salt!” Leon said. Aaron put salt in beer for some extra flavor. He took it wherever he could get it; the way he smoked, his sense of taste was down for the count like a pug in against Sugar Ray Robinson.
Leon cared nothing for that. He liked the way the salt made the beer bubble. Once he was happy, Aaron took the drinks out front. Leon followed. Howard ruffled his curly hair and tickled him. Leon squealed. He liked Howard, which made Aaron cut the actor more slack than he might have otherwise.
“L’chaim!” Aaron said. They all clinked glasses—two tall, two short—and drank. The beer was cold and smooth. Not expensive beer, but Aaron had never had expensive tastes. His younger brother did. Affording them sometimes got interesting for Marvin.
Everything stayed cheery and familial for about a minute and a half. Then Roxane pointed to a frame hanging above the rocking chair Aaron was sitting in. “What’s that?” she asked. “I don’t remember it from the last time we came over.”
“I made it myself,” Aaron said, not without pride. And he had: he’d done the backing and the wooden pieces, and
he’d cut and fitted the glass, too. He was handy with tools. He always had been. Any kind of tools or machinery—he could make them sit up, roll over, and do what he wanted. It wasn’t a rare knack or a great big one, but he had it.
“But what did you go and frame?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Roxane came over to see for herself. Aaron downed the rest of his Burgie in a hurry. Things wouldn’t stay cheery or familial much longer. Roxane had to lean past his chair to see what the envelope and the letter under it were. She straightened and angrily turned on him. “Oh, Aaron, how could you?”
“Because I darn well wanted to, that’s how,” Aaron answered, setting his chin. No, he didn’t start quarrels, but he didn’t back away from them, either. “Not every day somebody gets a commendation letter from the President of the United States.”
“I wouldn’t be so proud of a letter that congratulates you for fighting for the reactionaries and against the working class.” Yes, Roxane wore her politics on her sleeve.
“I caught that Russian flyer after he A-bombed L.A.,” Aaron said. “If Comrade Working Class dropped it a couple of miles farther west, you wouldn’t be here kvetching at me. And if I didn’t catch him and take him to the cops, odds are he’d’ve been hanging from a lamppost fifteen minutes later.”
“Can we talk about something else, please?” Ruth said. She didn’t like arguments. Aaron sometimes thought she’d married into the wrong clan. Bravely, she went on, “And can we do it after dinner? It ought to be just about ready.” She hurried into the kitchen to check—and, by the way ice cubes clinked, to reload.
“Sounds like a good idea.” Howard’s politics lay at least as far to the left as his wife’s, but he wasn’t so strident about them. Roxane was so sure about what she imagined she knew, she might almost have been a Finch.
Ruth had boiled the tongue with potatoes and carrots and celery and onions. Aaron’s mother had made it the same way, though his family was from Romania, not White Russia. Peasants—Yehudim and goyim alike—must have made it the same way all across Eastern Europe.
Fallout Page 9