Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “So you say, anyhow.” Out of the blue, Sukhanov switched to Mandarin almost as fluent as Vasili’s: “Do you understand me when I speak this language?”

  Vasili was glad he’d wasted time in gambling halls. His face stayed blank in spite of his surprise. “That’s Chinese, isn’t it?” he said. “Traders would come over the Amur and jabber like that. I learned a little of the stuff they’d yell when they got mad. You stupid turtle, that kind of thing.” He put on a Russian accent thicker than the Chekist’s. Still playing dumb, he added, “It’s like mat, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not filthy the same way mat is. It’s filthy a different way.” Sukhanov shook his head in annoyance, like a bear batting at a hive when the bees went for his nose and ears. He scowled at Vasili. “You can go. I can’t pin anything on you. You aren’t wrong—Grigory Papanin is a dick with the gleets. But you haven’t got all your cards on the table, either. Not even close.”

  “Comrade Sukhanov, who but a fool ever puts any more of his cards on the table than he has to?” Vasili was a great many things. Not even the arrogant Chinese had ever accused him of being a fool.

  He won a chuckle from the militiaman, who’d been watching him and the Chekist go back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “He’s got you there, Gleb Ivanovich,” the fellow said.

  “And who asked you?” Sukhanov snapped.

  The militiaman deflated like a balloon in a rose bush. Vasili could practically see the poor guy’s balls crawl up into his belly. “Nobody, Comrade. Sorry,” he muttered, staring at the spot on the floor between his shoes.

  Everywhere you went, there were important people, and then there was everybody else. There sure had been in Harbin. And there were in Smidovich, too, even if someone important here would have been a nobody anywhere else. An MGB man here was one of the people who gave orders. The town militiaman was one of those who had to take them.

  Sukhanov’s gaze didn’t seem so mild and friendly as it had while he was arranging Vasili’s documents. “Yes, you can go,” he said. “But I’ve got my eye on you now.”

  Vasili and the militiaman left together. Which was less happy with the world would have been hard to say. Vasili was unhappy with one part of the world in particular: the part named Grigory Papanin.

  —

  Luisa Hozzel and Trudl Bachman worked a two-man—well, here a two-woman—saw. Back and forth, back and forth. Sooner or later, the damned pine would fall. Luisa hoped it fell sooner. Camp work norms stayed the same no matter how hard it snowed.

  And it snowed…more than Luisa had imagined it could snow anywhere. The camp lay at somewhere not far from the same latitude as Fulda. The days here had grown shorter about the same way they did in the town where she’d lived her whole life till the Russians grabbed her.

  To her way of thinking, that meant the camp should have had the same kind of weather as Fulda. And it had, during the summer. It got about as hot as Fulda ever did, and about as muggy. There were more mosquitoes here in the course of a day than Fulda saw in a hundred years, but mosquitoes weren’t exactly a part of the weather.

  The trouble was, summer here didn’t last. Snow started in October, and kept piling up and piling up. Luisa was convinced this was how the last Ice Age must have started.

  As she learned more Russian, and as the woman prisoners from the USSR picked up scraps of German, she got to indulge in the ancient human pleasure of complaining about the weather. Almost without exception, the Russians and other Soviet folk thought that was hysterically funny. Some of them came from places with climates worse than this. All of them knew of such places.

  “You hear of Kolyma?” one of the bitches asked in a mishmash of Russian and German.

  Luisa’d shaken her head. “What Kolyma? Where Kolyma?”

  The woman—her name was Nadezhda Chukovskaya—pointed north. “On edge of Arctic Ocean. Lots of camps around Kolyma. All bad, some worser, some worstest. In winter, you know what they give you for punishment for not making norms?”

  “Chto?” Luisa asked. What? was a handy question in any language.

  “They put you in tent without heat.” The bitch mimed shivering. She was a pretty good mime—and she glanced at Luisa sidelong, to see the impression she was making. Luisa ignored that, wondering how much colder it would be up there than it was here.

  “How do you keep from freezing?” She couldn’t imagine any way.

  “Chekists kind people,” Nadezhda said. “They let you run around tent to stay warm. They don’t shoot you for doing.”

  What really alarmed Luisa about that was how the Russian woman sounded as if she meant it. As far as she was concerned, the camp guards might have put people in those tents without giving them any chance at all not to die. Why not? Luisa thought. Hitler’s men did such things. Everyone knew it, even if nobody talked about it.

  When the tree she and Trudl were felling started to sway, snow fell off a branch and hit her in the face. Brushing it out of her mouth and nose and eyes, she shouted, “Yob tvoyu mat’!”

  Snow fell near Trudl, too, but didn’t get her the way it got Luisa. Gustav’s boss’ wife clucked. “Going native, are you?” she asked in German.

  “It doesn’t seem quite so bad in Russian,” Luisa said sheepishly.

  “I don’t know. If you ask me, it’s worse,” Trudl Bachman said. “All the Russians swear like sailors or whores. They swear so much, they don’t even notice they’re doing it. It’s nothing but the foulest language every minute of every day.”

  It wasn’t as if she were wrong. Luisa had noticed the same thing. You couldn’t very well not notice it. She said, “I think it’s like it was in the Weimar inflation, when you needed a wheelbarrow full of marks to buy a paper or a can of beans.”

  Trudl frowned. “What do you mean? I don’t follow.” Neither one of them stopped working as they talked, though they did slow down. The pine would crash to the ground soon enough to keep the guard quiet either way.

  “When one mark isn’t worth anything, you need a stack of marks to get something,” Luisa said. “When you swear all the time, one cuss word doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to string a bunch of them together to let off any steam at all.”

  “Oh. Now I get you,” Trudl said. “Yes, you may be right. My Aunt Käthe was one of those people who went to church every Sunday and tithed for the poor and that kind of thing. The hardest word I ever heard her say was ‘Shucks,’ and she only said that a couple of times. But she got more from it when she did than Max would if he cussed for a week.”

  “There you are.” Luisa nodded. “And here we are, too.” The tree tottered and started to come down. Both women shouted warnings to the others in the work gang and skipped out of the way. The pine dropped within a meter or so of where Luisa’d thought it would, kicking up a flying white veil of snow. Not without a certain pride, Luisa said, “We’re getting good at this.”

  “We are, ja,” Trudl said as a hooded crow flapped away cawing in fright. “For as long as we live, though, is this all the Russians will let us get good at?”

  Luisa had no answer to that. She couldn’t imagine any zek who did have an answer to it. If they made you do something over and over and over again, you could hardly help getting good at it. Practice would make you good whether you wanted it to or not.

  And then you starve to death, and they throw you into a hole in the ground, and some other poor soul gets good at whatever it was you used to do, she thought.

  Trudl’s mind wend down a different track, or perhaps not so different after all. “I think I’d kiss a pig to keep from going out here every day. This is death, nothing else.”

  “If that’s how you feel, Lord knows you’ve got plenty of pigs to choose from,” Luisa said tartly.

  As if to prove her point, one of the guards ambled over to the downed tree. He had a flat, Asiatic face, and didn’t speak a whole lot of Russian himself. What he did speak was even more full of obscenity than most people’s here. “You knock t
hat fucker over, hey?”

  “Da.” Luisa was still proud of how precisely the pine had fallen.

  “Khorosho.” The guard hefted his submachine gun. “Now you cunts trim that prick. Got work norm to meet. Get your ugly asses walloped, you no meet him.”

  “Da,” Luisa said again, this time on a lower note. How could you take pride in what you did if the people you did it for, the people who made you do it, wouldn’t let you?

  She and Trudl went to work with one-man saws and hatchets, hacking the branches off the trunk. Then they cut the trunk into chunks small enough for two people to haul them. Luisa stopped caring how cold it was. She worked up a sweat under her quilted jacket and trousers. She’d be chilled and clammy when she eased up, but she couldn’t do anything about that now.

  There was less than half as much daylight at this season as there was in high summer. The sadistic oafs who set norms did take that into account. Even if they couldn’t tell the difference between men and women, they could understand that guards had trouble stopping escapes if zeks disappeared into the darkness. As twilight lowered like a candle-snuffer, the work gang trudged through the snow back to the encampment.

  Evening lineup was the usual botch. Luisa stood there and stood there, getting hungrier and hungrier, while the guards shouted at the zeks and at one another. At last they decided no one had run away. Supper was a stew of cabbage and salt fish and a brick of black bread. Luisa had had worse. She wouldn’t have believed that was possible when she first got here, but she knew better now. As in all things, there were degrees of misery.

  There certainly were degrees of exhaustion. When Luisa tumbled into slumber, she hoped she wouldn’t come out.

  “RAIN, RAIN, RAIN!” Leon said happily from the back seat.

  “Well, kiddo-shmiddo, you got that right.” Aaron Finch was less delighted than his son. He was driving, and Leon wasn’t. He was also more than two and a half. Rain to him wasn’t something exciting. It was a nuisance, and a dangerous nuisance at that.

  It drummed down on the roof of the newly acquired Chevy and splashed from the windows and windshield. The Chevy’s wipers were lazier than Aaron would have liked. He hadn’t checked that when he bought the car, and grumbled to himself for not thinking of it. Next time, he told himself. When I buy my Rolls. That was ridiculous enough for him to stop giving himself a hard time.

  The traffic light ahead changed. “It’s red, dear,” Ruth said.

  “I know, dear,” Aaron said with heavy patience. He hit the brake. On the other side of the transmission hump, Ruth’s foot pressed down on an imaginary brake pedal. He thought that was funny…up to a point. As the Chevy smoothly stopped—he had checked the brakes—he glanced over at her and added, “This car drives from the left front seat only.”

  “I’m not a backseat driver,” his wife said.

  “Only ’cause you’re sitting in the front seat with me,” he answered. She made a face at him. He laughed. She didn’t drive at all, but she thought she could tell him how to do it. This wasn’t the first time he’d trotted out his left-front-seat maxim—nowhere close.

  Anybody else who did that kind of thing would have driven him straight up the wall. That he could laugh about it when Ruth did it showed how much in love he was. Either that or it showed how many of his marbles had already dribbled out his ears. Senility didn’t run in his family, but maybe he’d prove an exception.

  He put the car in gear just as Ruth opened her mouth to go, It’s green. She closed it again. If he called her on that one, she’d deny everything. Well, he would have denied it, too, if she tried to gig him for something he hadn’t actually said.

  After a moment, she did speak up again: “I’m glad you’re burying the hatchet with Marvin.”

  “You mean, and not in Marvin?” he asked, about three-quarters kidding. The remaining quarter was enough to make her look worried, or maybe scared. He took a hand off the wheel and waggled it to let her know she could relax. “I won’t start anything if he doesn’t, promise.”

  “Okay.” She sounded relieved. If she knew one thing about her husband, she knew he kept his promises.

  He was trying to get Leon to be as serious about them as he was. So far, the results were mixed. He kept reminding himself Leon was just a little kid. Not many his age were smarter, but his age wasn’t very big. He was still working out where his imagination stopped and the real world started.

  Up into the hills Aaron drove. The way it looked to him, Marvin was still working out the same thing. The difference was, Aaron’s brother didn’t have the excuse of being a toddler.

  When they got to Marvin’s house, Aaron and Ruth both popped open umbrellas. Leon paid no attention, but started to charge up the walk on his own. Then he discovered that raindrops were more fun when they were on the outside of something and you were on the inside. He came charging back to Daddy and Mommy and the shelter of their bumbershoots.

  Aaron knocked on the front door. His brother opened it. “Look what washed up on our shore,” Marvin said. “Nice weather for ducks, hey?”

  “Yeah, it’s not all it’s quacked up to be,” Aaron said. Marvin sent him a reproachful look. So did Ruth. She’d known Finches made bad puns before she met him, but she hadn’t known how bad they could get.

  Marvin stuck the umbrellas in a brass boot. He was the kind of person who put a brass boot in the front hall in case of umbrellas. “Come on in,” he said, gesturing toward the living room. In Aaron and Ruth and Leon came.

  “Surprise!” everybody yelled. Actually, Caesar the German shepherd barked, but he barked twice, so even that worked out.

  There were Sarah and Olivia and Sarah’s mother, who lived with them. There were Ruth’s two brothers, Chaim and Ben—alike as two balding peas in a pod, except one was thin and the other chunky—and her sister Bernice, all in from the wilds of Reseda in the Valley. Bernice looked the way Ruth would have if she dyed her hair red and weren’t so pretty. There were Roxane and Howard and Roxane’s mother, Fanny Seraph. And there was Herschel Weissman, a martini in his hand.

  Everybody but Caesar started singing “Happy Birthday.” By the way Ruth joined in, Aaron knew she’d been part of the plot. His actual birthday had been the Sunday before. Ruth had fixed a big mess of chicken pippiks and hearts, which he loved. And she’d got him a copy of The Caine Mutiny. He really wanted to read that one. He hadn’t been a Navy man, but he’d seen shipboard action himself. He’d figured that was as much of a celebration as he’d get. It was as much as he wanted. But he’d figured wrong.

  “Happy fiftieth, you alter kacker,” Marvin said, clapping him on the back.

  “Good God!” Aaron said. “I think the last time I had a birthday party, I was turning nine.” Everyone laughed.

  Bernice kissed him on the cheek. Her breath smelled of whiskey. It often did. Aaron thought she was holding the bottle and not the other way around, but he wasn’t sure. She sold shoes at a store on Sherman Way, the Valley’s main drag. Chaim wrote bulletins and manuals at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys. Ben…Ben had come back from the South Pacific with malaria, and maybe with combat fatigue, too. He was bright, but he was also damaged. He had trouble finding a job and more trouble holding one.

  People pressed presents on Aaron. He found himself awash in booze, which was nice, and in ties, which he could have lived without. No way in hell he would ever wear the gaudy one Howard Bauman gave him—he thought blue dress shirts were loud. He made grateful noises anyway.

  Dinner was an enormous ham with candied yams—they were Sarah’s specialty. Marvin raised a glass. “Here’s to treyf!” he said. Almost all the Jews at the table drank. Leon didn’t, but his only drinking was a taste of Manischewitz at Passover. He ate ham and yams with great enthusiasm. And neither did Fanny Seraph, who clung to Old Country ways. There was chicken for her.

  Two apple pies served as dessert. When Sarah’s mother brought them out of the kitchen, Aaron said, “What will the rest of you eat?” He got another
laugh.

  After dinner, the talk turned to politics. Everybody had an idea about who would run for the Democrats now that Truman had bowed out. Roxane and Howard, predictably, liked Hubert Humphrey, who stood furthest to the left. So did Sarah and Ben. Marvin was for Averell Harriman, and seemed offended that his wife dared have an opinion of her own. Aaron and Ruth and Bernice and Chaim spoke up for Adlai Stevenson.

  “I’d like to like him,” Herschel Weissman said. “I do like him—as a man. But he’s not in touch with the people. He thinks too much. He doesn’t feel enough. He’d make a better professor than a President.”

  That was more sensible than Aaron wished it were. Not caring to argue with his boss, he said, “Any of them would be okay. The real question is, Who will the Republicans run against our guy?”

  “Before the war started, I would have bet on Taft or Eisenhower,” Weissman said. “Now…Now that McCarthy mamzer is making so much noise, he may grab it in spite of everything. Everything sane, I mean.”

  “God forbid!” Aaron exclaimed, at the same time as his wife said the same thing in Yiddish.

  “He’s a Nazi,” Roxane said. Howard nodded vigorously. He would, having made the acquaintance of the Un-American Activities Committee. But Aaron had trouble arguing with his wife’s cousin himself.

  “Alevai it won’t happen!” Chaim said.

  “Alevai omayn!” half a dozen people chorused.

  “Alevai omayn!” Leon echoed. Sometimes you were lucky, not having any idea of what was going on.

  —

  “Here you go, Comrade Captain,” the Hungarian secret policeman said in German, the only tongue he shared with Boris Gribkov. “Drink this. It will put hair on your chest.”

  This was a tumbler of strong red wine. Gribkov had never been much of a wine drinker. He chose beer for a little buzz, vodka when he was serious about pouring it down. Declining here, though, didn’t seem like a good idea, so he drank.

  “Very tasty,” he said, putting the tumbler down half-empty. “Yes, very tasty.” His German wasn’t as good as the Hungarian’s. “What do you call it?”