They bossed the politicals around. They were used to this kind of life, where the women who’d thought of themselves as good Communists till the MGB grabbed them kept trying to believe it was all a ghastly mistake. The bitches bossed the foreigners around, too. Some of them were bull dykes, and as predatory as any man. Luisa didn’t mind being bossed—they knew the ropes and she didn’t. The other…She counted herself lucky no one had put a serious move on her yet.
When all the zeks were in place, the guards went up and down, making sure each row held ten women and counting the rows. That kind of arithmetic, even a camp guard could do. The Reds might not believe in God, but the count was sacred. Till the morning count came out right, nobody got breakfast. Till the evening count was right, no one ate supper or went into the barracks. At this season, that wasn’t too bad. In winter, standing there in, say, half a meter of snow…
At last, after literally counting on their fingers to make sure they had everything straight, the guards decided no one had somehow escaped the camp for the dubious shelter of the pine forest that ran on for untold hundreds or thousands of kilometers in every direction. The top sergeant pointed toward the dining hall and yelled something that meant either Go! or Eat!—Luisa hadn’t worked out which yet.
She went and she ate. Rations had been small and rotten—often literally—at the end of the war. They hadn’t got better for a long time afterwards. Then, when they did, the Russians overran Fulda, and times turned tough all over again. Nothing, though, nothing had prepared her for what she got in the gulag.
She hadn’t been to Dachau or Buchenwald, let alone Treblinka or Auschwitz. Maybe people there had got this kind of horrible slop. If they had, all the atrocity stories the Allies told were true. She didn’t know how you were supposed to live. All she could do was try.
The stew the cook ladled into her bowl was so watery, it barely deserved the name. Bits of chopped cabbage and turnip or potato or parsnip or some other root gave most of what bulk it had. It was also vaguely briny; at some point or another, a salted herring or sardine must have swum past the cauldron it came out of.
Her parents, who’d lived through the Turnip Winter and the sawdust-stretched war bread of the Kaiser’s time, would have turned up their noses at the black, badly baked brick she got with her stew. It was full of husks, and what grain there was was rye and oats.
In Fulda, she’d drunk coffee white with milk at breakfast. The wartime ersatz had been bad, but it beat the devil out of the weak tea the Russians grudgingly gave the zeks. They didn’t even waste sugar on prisoners. The stuff’s sole virtue was, it was hot.
No matter how bad the food was, she wolfed it. Partly, that was because she was hungry all the time. And they gave you only fifteen minutes to eat. Whatever you couldn’t down in that time, you lost.
After breakfast…latrine call. Luisa had used some odorous outhouses in Germany, but nothing like these slit trenches. Everyone took care of her business—piss, shit, period, whatever—in front of everyone else. The setup was designed to humiliate. You tried not to breathe. You tried not to look. But Hercules, even if he’d cleaned out the Augean Stables, would have thrown up his hands and run away if he saw—and got a whiff of—this.
Then the women separated into work gangs and went out into those endless woods to fell trees. The Soviet Union proudly proclaimed equality between the sexes. It lived up to its claims by making the work norm for a gang of women the same as that for a gang of men. Guards cursed at zeks to keep them working. If that didn’t work, they clouted them with the butts of their machine pistols.
Luisa and Trudl Bachman inexpertly used a two-person saw almost as tall as they were. This was what you got for having husbands who’d gone off to fight the Russians. Neither of them had any idea whether their man was alive or dead. They were both paying the price either way.
Back and forth, back and forth. Beavers as inept as they were would never have toppled enough trees to build a dam. Luisa’s shoulders had the toothache. Sharper pain came from her hands. The blisters on her palms popped and bled, over and over. Some of the women who’d been here for years had calluses that let them stub out smokes without feeling a thing. Those were ugly, but Luisa craved them just the same.
Up in a pine tree no one was attacking, a jay called. Luisa could see it if she looked up. But it didn’t sound like the jays back in Germany. It spoke a different dialect, the way a woman from Munich and one from up near the Dutch border would have.
When she looked up once too often, a guard yelled, “Bistro!” He wasn’t looking for a French restaurant with a zinc bar. That was how you said Hurry up! in Russian.
After a while—it only seemed forever—the pine crashed to the ground. The jay flew off, screeching in fear. Luisa and Trudl traded the saw for two hatchets. They used them to trim the branches from the trunk. Bending to do that made Luisa ache in different ways in different places.
They put in twelve hours like that before the guards paraded them back to the camp. Luisa shambled along like a dead thing. They lined up for the evening count. As usual, the screws needed to try more than once before they were happy. Supper was breakfast over again.
Tomorrow would be the same as today. She had no idea how long they meant to keep her here. Till she was dead? Till Stalin was dead? Till the A-bombs made sure everybody was dead?
For now, she was too weary to care. After evening latrine call, she clambered into her bunk, took off her boots, and laid them under her head. When you got tired enough, any pillow felt great. She was tired enough and then some. She closed her eyes. She vanished.
—
Cade Curtis wore a clean uniform. His cheeks were freshly shaved. His hair was GI short, and smelled pleasantly of Vitalis. Except for the PPSh he carried, he might have been ready to appear in a Stateside review. It was nighttime, and blacked-out nighttime at that, so no one could get a good look at him, but he knew.
He clucked sadly as he slid into the jeep. “After you’ve spent a while in Pusan, you don’t want to go back to the front,” he said.
The corporal behind the wheel chuckled. “Sir, if I had a buck for every guy who told me that, I’d be rich like Rockefeller. A quarter, even.”
“I believe you,” Cade said. Pusan was almost as American as apple pie. When you got leave, you could go there to clean up. Cade had. You could eat American food that didn’t come out of ration cans. Cade had. You could get crocked out of your skull. Cade had. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but nobody’d asked him about that, so he hadn’t had to tell any lies.
And you could indulge in other pleasures. Korean women had quickly discovered that American men had more money than they knew what to do with. You didn’t have to look very hard or very far to find joyhouses. Cade had. Buying his fun faintly embarrassed him. Buying it was better than going without, though. He’d been careful to use his pro kit right away every time.
The corporal started the jeep and put it in gear. Away it rolled, reliable as jeeps always were. It didn’t roll very fast, though. Driving through darkness without headlights was suicidal if you hurried.
Driving through darkness in Korea with headlights was also suicidal. “Here’s hoping Bedcheck Charlie takes the night off,” Cade said.
“Amen to that!” the driver agreed. The Red Chinese and North Koreans flew night-harassment missions in ancient Russian wood-and-cloth-and-wire biplane trainers. They were slow and underpowered even by World War I standards. But they carried a machine gun and little bombs a pilot could lob from the cockpit as if all the years after 1915 had been canceled. They were damn nuisances, and they could kill you just as dead as more modern toys.
White-painted posts by the side of the road gave faint clues about where you were about to go off it. Nearer the front, North Korean infiltrators knocked them down or lied with them to lead traffic off the road and sometimes into an ambush. This close to the big American base on the southern coast, though, they were probably reliable.
Of course, the
highway itself was in bad shape. The flimsy paving hadn’t been made to support all the tanks and trucks and halftracks that used it. It also hadn’t been made to get shelled. The potholes were of the tooth-rattling, kidney-crunching variety.
“Boy, this is a fun ride,” Cade said after a jounce made him bite his tongue. “How much do I have to pay to get off?”
“Sir, you got to take that up with Uncle Sam, not with me,” the corporal said. They both laughed, for all the world as if it were funny.
They’d come ten or fifteen miles northwest when the formidable antiaircraft batteries around Pusan all started banging away at once. Cade peered back over his shoulder at the red and orange and yellow tracers scribing lines across the southern sky and the shells bursting in air.
“Looks like the Fourth of July there,” he said.
“It does, yeah.” The driver nodded. “I can see a skosh in my rear-view mirror. You don’t mind, I ain’t gonna turn around like you done.” Like a lot of men in the Far East, the corporal used the Japanese for a little bit without even noticing it wasn’t English.
And then Cade stopped caring about Japanese slang or any other kind, for a new sun blazed in the sky above Pusan. He crossed himself and whispered a Hail Mary before he even thought about it. Beside him, in the driver’s seat, the corporal moved his lips in prayer, too.
Then the two-striper asked, “Sir, are we too far away for that fucker to, like, fry us?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Cade answered slowly. “I think we are, but I sure wouldn’t swear to it or anything.”
“Okay. Good.” The corporal nodded. Behind them, the glow of riven atoms slowly faded. Cade stared, transfixed at the hellish beauty of the rising, swelling mushroom cloud. The corporal went on, “What do you want me to do now, sir? Go on taking you north or turn around so we can lend a hand to them poor sorry bastards back there?”
No one could possibly fault Cade for telling the driver to go on toward the front. That was what he was supposed to be doing. But his orders didn’t take the A-bomb into account, and it struck him as more urgent than one more first lieutenant in the trenches. “I won’t command you to turn around,” he said after the briefest of pauses. “But if you’re willing to do that, I’ll thank you for it.”
“Gotcha, sir. That’s jake by me.” The corporal made a neat Y-turn on the narrow road. They’d just started heading south again when wind from the atomic blast briefly buffeted the jeep. The driver let out a harsh chuckle. “We’re a coupla goddamn fools, is what we are, y’know?”
“Now that you mention it, that did cross my mind, yes,” Cade said, which made the corporal laugh again.
They hadn’t gone very far south before there was another flash in the sky behind them, which meant that A-bomb blew to the northwest. It was much farther away than the one that had just incinerated Pusan. Somberly, the driver said, “The guys you was goin’ back to, Lieutenant, they’re liable not to be there no more.”
“I know.” Those were Cade’s men, up there in the trenches near Chongju. Or they had been. Now they were part of a new mushroom cloud. If I hadn’t got leave and gone drinking and making a pig of myself and getting my ashes hauled, I’d be dead with them, Cade thought. Guilt pierced him for no better reason than that he was still breathing and they weren’t. The top part of his mind understood how ridiculous the feeling was, which didn’t make it go away.
The other thing was, the Americans had just had a big hole bitten out of their line. Would the Red Chinese and the North Koreans swarm through it? He was all too sure they would. How much would they care if their soldiers got a little radioactive, or more than a little? That question answered itself as soon as it occurred to him.
There was light ahead, not just from the dissipating mushroom cloud above Pusan but also from the countless ordinary fires the bomb had set. “Fuck it,” the driver said. “I’m gonna turn on my headlights. We got bigger things to worry about than Bedcheck Charlie an’ gooks with Tommy guns.”
“Fine by me.” Cade wanted to see what he could, too. How often did you find yourself on the edge of an atomic explosion?
Once, he soon decided, was at least three times too often. The farther in they got, the worse things looked. Tents burned. Prefab buildings went over as if they’d been assembled from playing cards. They caught fire, too. Fighter planes that hadn’t got off the ground blazed. So did the trucks that had fueled them.
Next to one of those trucks writhed a burning man. If you splashed kerosene on a cockroach and tossed in a match, the effect would have been similar but smaller. “Christ!” the corporal said. “Is he too far away for you to shoot him with that thing?”
Cade glanced down at the PPSh in his lap. “Afraid so. I sure would if I could, though.”
“Oh, hell, yes. But Jesus God, sir, what are we gonna do? What can we do? What can anybody do? This goddamn thing is too big for people to do any good with.”
Although Cade thought he was right, they did get stopped and put to work before they’d gone much farther. They made up two links in the human chain of a bucket brigade that was trying without much luck to keep a barracks from going up in flames. Cade wondered how radioactive he was getting. Then another bucket came by. Passing it along was easier than thinking.
IT WAS A PARTY of sorts—a going-away party. It wasn’t a big party. Marian Staley hadn’t made or wanted to make friends at Camp Nowhere. Most of the people stuck there, and the people in charge of the people stuck there, weren’t people she would have cared to have anything to do with in normal times.
But she’d known Fayvl Tabakman before, back when there still were such things as normal times. The two of them shared a bond, too, a bond of loss and disaster. It was a negative bond, yes, but no less real for that. And Fayvl’s cronies, Yitzkhak and Moishe, also understood loss and disaster from the inside out.
Moishe produced what looked like a wine bottle. After he swigged from it, though, he passed it to Marian with the warning, “Drink—but go easy.”
She did, with the caution he’d advised. She didn’t worry about drinking from a bottle someone else had used the way she would have before normal times vanished in fire and destruction. Even so, when she swallowed she wondered if she’d downed a lit Bunsen burner.
“Wow!” she said once speech returned to her charred vocal cords. “That’s—strong.”
“Uh-huh.” The middle-aged Jew from—from Minsk, that was where he’d grown up—nodded. “Pretty good samogon. How you say in English samogon?”
“Moonshine,” Fayvl said. He had a knock himself, then passed the bottle to Yitzkhak. “Yes, not bad.”
“Moonshine.” Moishe thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He was one of those people who needed to be right all the time and got furious at himself when he wasn’t.
Yitzkhak also drank. He raised the bottle in salute to Marian. “Here’s to going from Camp Nowhere to somewhere that’s alevai somewhere.”
“Thanks.” She took the bottle. She had to drink to that. She didn’t think it was exactly moonshine—to her, that meant raw whiskey. This stuff was more like brandy, even if it had started life as Welch’s grape juice. The second sip didn’t burn so much. Maybe her gullet was stunned.
“We’ll miss you. I’ll miss you,” Fayvl said as he also drank again.
Moishe and Yitzkhak nodded. She didn’t think they meant it the same way the cobbler did. He was sweet on her. She would have laughed at that before Bill died. Now—who could say? People needed people, and not all the combinations that wound up working were the obvious ones.
“How come I don’t get any of that?” Linda asked as the grown-ups passed the bottle back and forth.
Fayvl, Yitzkhak, and Moishe laughed. After a second, so did Marian. “It’s booze, honey,” she explained.
“Oh,” Linda said, and then, “Yuck!”
“Before the war started, she kept after Bill to give her a sip of beer,” Marian said. “Finally, he let her have some. She taste
d it and she looked at him and asked, ‘Am I poisoned?’ ”
The three survivors of the worst the Old World could do laughed again. “I been poisoned on beer sometimes,” Fayvl said, miming a deadly headache.
“Yuck!” Linda said again, this time because of his expression.
Yitzkhak asked, “So what you will do, now you get out of this place?”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t know. Pick up the pieces. Try to find a job.” Marian didn’t mention that she’d already had to spend money to get the Studebaker running again. Tires, battery, spark plugs, oil…Nothing came cheap. She did her best not to think about that. “Whatever it is, I’ll be doing it out in freedom, not—here.”
“Freedom,” Fayvl echoed wistfully. “Freedom is wonderful.”
“Freedom is hard to find, is what freedom is,” Moishe said. “Used to be some here. How much is left in the middle of a stupid war? Well, who knows?”
Marian had heard stories that also made her wonder. After the A-bombs fell, the West Coast and some inland states where the governor and legislature got killed went under martial law, or something as close to it as made no difference.
In a way, it made sense. The military and the National Guard had lots of members. They had organization and discipline. And they had guns. If you needed to govern areas where civilian administration had literally gone up in smoke, where else would you turn?
That was fine for the short term. But as the short term grew longer, then what? How did you unfry and unscramble the egg? How did you get civilian government going again? How did you persuade the military to let go of the reins?
Those were all interesting questions. Marian had answers to none of them. “I’ll just have to see what it’s like and how things work out, that’s all,” she said.
Pretty soon, the bottle was empty. Marian’s head spun; she was glad she wasn’t leaving till tomorrow morning. Welcome to freedom! You’re under arrest for driving drunk! That wouldn’t be the way to celebrate getting away from the refugee camp, would it?
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