“The suspension’s good. The engine’s good. The armor…It’s sloped well, but it won’t stop an AP round or a bazooka,” Konstantin said.
“Neither will a T-54’s,” Eigims said.
“Well, you aren’t wrong, no matter how much I wish you were. But with a T-54, we have as good a chance of killing the other guy as he does against us. The gun we’ve got now won’t put a round through a Pershing’s frontal armor, or a Centurion’s. Not a chance.”
“Mm, there is that,” the Balt allowed. “We’re still here, though.”
“I noticed that, yes,” Konstantin said dryly. Eigims chuckled. The tank commander continued, “We haven’t had to do any tank-against-tank fighting lately. That has a lot to do with why we’re still here.”
“Why are we here?” Juris Eigims spoke in musing tones. “Why is anybody here? Why is there a here to be in? What’s the point to any of it? Does any of it have a point?”
“You think I’ve got answers to shit like that?” Konstantin stared at his gunner. “What I’ve got is some schnapps, if you want it. You can use it to wash the taste of questions like those out of your mouth.”
“Do you have enough so everybody gets a slug?” Eigims asked. “I don’t want to make a pig of myself.”
“ ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ Karl Marx knew what he was talking about there, fuck me in the mouth if he didn’t,” Morozov said. Eigims didn’t try to tell him he was wrong, or that Marx was. For anybody in the Red Army to reject the preachings of the founder of the world Communist movement would have been like a Crusader bound for Jerusalem denying the Virgin Birth.
Konstantin opened one of the storage bins some enterprising mechanic or repairman had welded onto the T-34/85 during the last war. They weren’t standard issue on the Soviet tank, as they had been on German machines. He took out a nearly full bottle of golden schnapps and tossed it to Eigims. The gunner caught it and yanked out the stopper. He tilted his head back. His Adam’s apple worked.
After a couple of coughs, he shook his head and said, “Whew! Well, if hooch like that doesn’t cure me of the constipation of philosophy, nothing ever will.”
“There you go!” Konstantin said. Eigims held out the bottle to him. He drank. He liked vodka better than schnapps, but schnapps beat the crap out of nothing.
And talking about schnapps drew the rest of the crew. Konstantin gave Demyan Belitsky the bottle. “Thank you, Comrade Sergeant,” the driver said politely. After his own swig, he passed it to Ilya Goledod. The bow gunner also guzzled. Goledod, from what Konstantin had seen, owned a thirst respectable even by Russian standards.
“Me? What about me?” Vazgen Sarkisyan said, watching in alarm as the schnapps level fell.
“What, you mean you want some, too?” Goledod sound as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Konstantin wouldn’t have tested the loader like that. Sarkisyan was twice as thick through the shoulders as the man holding the bottle. Goledod handed it to him in the nick of time.
Though not a Russian, Sarkisyan could also put it away. He upended the bottle, drained it, and chucked it into the bushes. “Good shit,” he said.
“We’ll all sleep hard tonight,” Konstantin said. Of course, they all would have slept hard without the schnapps, too. When war gave you a chance, you curled up and hibernated like a wintering bear. He also knew he still didn’t have the full strength and energy he’d enjoyed before his bout with radiation sickness. Neither did Eigims or Sarkisyan. They functioned, but they were still damaged. In that, they were much like the army of which they made up a tiny part.
Next morning, Konstantin dry-swallowed aspirins. Schnapps hurt him worse than vodka did. His headache was in retreat when Captain Lezkov, the regimental CO, summoned his tank commanders. “We are ordered to make another attack in the direction of Paderborn,” he said.
None of the sergeants said anything. Most of them were men Konstantin’s age, men who’d put in their share of attacks in this fight and more than their share during the Great Patriotic War. When the brass told you attack in the direction of Somewhere-or-other, they didn’t think you’d get there. From the way the fighting had been going, Morozov didn’t think they’d get to Paderborn, either. The enemy had their tails up. They also had more bazookas than they knew what to do with.
“I will be in the lead tank,” Captain Lezkov said. “I promise you, no one will get ahead of me. We will do what we are commanded to do. How do you like that, comrades?”
“We serve the Soviet Union!” the sergeants chorused. And the Soviet Union serves us, too—medium-rare, Konstantin thought.
He delivered the news to his crew. “And we’ll be the point tank for our platoon?” Demyan Belitsky asked, sounding gloomily sure he already knew the answer.
And he did. Konstantin nodded. “That’s how they’re going to do it.”
“Maybe we’ll stay lucky one more time,” the driver said.
“Or maybe something will break down and they’ll have to leave us behind. That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?” Ilya Goledod said.
Morozov eyed the bow gunner. “That won’t happen. Not a chance. And if you try to make it happen, I’ll tie you to a post so the MGB firing squad can finish you off. Is that clear enough, or shall I draw you a picture, too?”
The bow gunner licked his lips. “That’s very clear, Comrade Sergeant.”
Nothing broke down. They clattered forward with the rest of the regiment. They’d got about a kilometer and a half closer to Paderborn when a bazooka round slammed into the engine compartment. The T-34/85 slewed sideways and stopped.
“Out!” Konstantin yelled. “Out as quick as you can! The next one blows us all to the Devil!” He scrambled out the cupola and jumped to the mud below. By what would do for a miracle, everyone escaped. Maybe that was the last round the bastard with the stovepipe had. But they wouldn’t see the inside of Paderborn, not without a new tank, or even a new old tank, they wouldn’t.
—
“Come on, you stupid pussies!” the camp guard shouted. “Come on, you sheep! Baaa! Time to get washed! Time to get sheared!”
Luisa Hozzel and Trudl Bachman made identical revolted faces at each other. They both hated this part of camp routine worse than anything else, even standing in ranks waiting for the morons counting them to be sure they had their numbers straight.
“It could be worse,” Trudl said resignedly.
“How?” Luisa demanded.
“He could have yelled, ‘To the showers!’ ”
“Oh.” Luisa had no comeback to that. Who possibly could? When SS guards sent Jews to the showers after they stumbled out of cattle cars at the camps in Poland, they got cyanide instead of hot water. The only way they left those camps was through the crematorium chimneys.
These Soviet gulags weren’t designed to murder you as soon as you arrived. Had they been, Luisa and her countrywomen would have been long dead. The Russians weren’t just out to murder people. They wanted to get work out of them, too. If they didn’t feed them enough or give them enough rest for the work they did, if zeks broke down and died in large numbers because they didn’t, that was a by-product of their system, not its planned result, as it had been with the Nazis.
The people who died were just as dead either way, of course.
“You’d better hurry up, cunts!” the guard said. “Or else I’ll kick your skinny asses all the way to the bathhouse!”
He meant it. He’d do it. He’d laugh while he did it, too. Luisa had seen him and his pals in action before. She’d felt his boot, or that of one of his comrades. And if her behind was skinnier now than it had been before she got to this awful place, that was the Reds’ fault, not hers. Gustav had always liked how she gave him plenty to grab.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad this time,” Trudl said as she and Luisa and the rest of the women from their barracks shambled toward the baths.
“And then you wake up!” Luisa didn’t believe it for a minute.
The baths and the clipping were always bad. Sometimes they were horrible.
Guards leered and whooped as the zeks peeled off their clothes and climbed into the tubs of water and harsh disinfectant. So did the bitches who took their pleasure from other women. As usual, Luisa tried to imagine everything was happening to someone else, not to her. As usual, she failed. However much she longed for that kind of detachment, she didn’t have it.
Despite the antiseptic reek and the guards’ relentless eyes, she enjoyed the bath. Hot water was a precious rarity in the camp. She wished she could soak in there, but the guards didn’t let you get away with that. You climbed in, you scrubbed, and they herded you out.
It did make sense. That way, they could funnel all the zeks through the baths as quickly as possible. Time wasted on maintaining their bodily well-being was time when they weren’t working. And what was a corrective-labor camp for, after all, if not corrective labor?
Naked, dripping, and rapidly getting cold, Luisa walked to the waiting barbers. Again, she did her best to pretend that none of this was happening to her. Again, that failed. It failed all the more completely because she found herself walking up to the man who’d clipped and fondled her when she first came, bewildered, into the camp.
“How do you like logging?” he asked in his accented German as he set to work.
“Not very much,” Luisa answered: such an obvious truth that she saw no point in wasting time lying about it.
The way his eyes traveled her body made her want to hit him. Only fear of what would happen to her if she did held her back. “You’re scrawnier than you were,” he said, as if that were her fault.
Luisa shrugged. “And so?”
“Lift your arms,” he said. Hating him, she obeyed. While he worked the clippers, he went on, “And so you don’t have to be, if you stay inside the wire with somebody who takes care of you.”
“Somebody like you, you mean?”
He nodded. “Ja. You take care of me, I take care of you, you don’t go to sleep with an empty belly every night.” He sheared away her pubic hair. As he had before, he felt her there while he did.
As it had before, it roused disgust and rage in her, not the lust he hoped for. “I’d sooner starve than give myself to you,” she said in tones that should have shriveled him to a raisin.
He only laughed. “Well, you’re on your way,” he said. “You’re lucky I still even notice you, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. Pretty soon, there won’t be enough of you left to bother with.”
“Are you finished, you—thing, you?”
He didn’t swat her on the backside, the way he had before. He patted her two or three times instead, as if he had every right to rest his hand there. That was worse. “I’m finished, all right,” he answered. “You’ll be finished yourself before long if you don’t get some sense.”
She walked off, her back stiff with fury she had no other way to show. As she started down the hall to retrieve her clothes, she saw Trudl Bachman laughing at something the man clipping her had said. Laughing!
Trudl wouldn’t forget Max so casually…would she? When she’d said she would kiss a pig to escape from the outside work gang, she’d been joking…hadn’t she?
The guards baked jackets and trousers and underwear and shoes to kill bugs and eggs. It was hard on the clothes, but it worked—for a few days, anyhow. But they couldn’t bake all the bedding. They couldn’t bake the whole barracks, which was what they really needed to do. Inevitably, she’d start itching and scratching again soon.
Coming out of the oven, the clothes were still hot when she put them back on. That had felt wonderful when winter was at its worst. Now, with the weather warming again, it wasn’t quite so great, but plenty of other women besides her sighed with pleasure as they got dressed.
Trudl came up. She found the clothes with her number painted on them. She sighed, too, when she put them on. In the gulag, enjoyment was where you found it, only you couldn’t find it in very many places.
Then again, you could find it if you went looking for it. “Is that barber a friend of yours?” Luisa asked, as casually as she could.
That wasn’t casually enough. “No, not really,” Trudl answered, her voice much colder than her jacket and trousers. “And even if he were, how does that make it your business?”
“I didn’t say it was my business. I just asked,” Luisa said. “It’s only that our husbands are friends if they’re still alive, and I hope to heaven that they are.”
“So do I, aber natürlich,” Trudl said. “But do you think we’ll ever see them again? We’re halfway around the world, we’re in this prison camp, and we’re behind the Iron Curtain. This is the only life we’ve got, Luisa. If it doesn’t get any better than it is now, is it worth living?”
Is getting a full stomach and a soft job worth prostituting yourself for? Is your life worth living after you do? Luisa knew that, if she asked that of Trudl, the husbands might still be friends, but the wives wouldn’t. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t asked the same questions of herself. Up till now, she’d answered them both with a no.
Up till now. How long in this camp before she changed her mind? That was the real question, the scary question, because Trudl wasn’t wrong.
A TANK CLANKED PAST Gustav Hozzel. He looked at it with faint, or not so faint, contempt. He hadn’t seen many Shermans on the Eastern Front. The Ivans got some as Lend-Lease from America, but German panzer crews worried about them much less than about the far more common T-34s. They did make trouble for German ground-pounders when no Wehrmacht panzers were around to knock them out. As the Ostfront slowly came to pieces, that happened ever more often.
His first thought on seeing this one was that it stood an even worse chance against modern Russian armor than it would have against a Panzer IV or a Panther. His second thought…“I’ll be fucked!” he exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t mind that myself about now,” Rolf said with a lewd grin.
“Oh, shut up,” Gustav told him. He pointed at the Sherman. “What do you see?”
“When I was in the Battle of the Bulge, we called them Tommy cookers,” Rolf answered. “One good hit and they’d burn like blazes.” His chuckle showed he meant that for a joke. It was as much of a sense of humor as he ever showed.
“Ja, ja,” Gustav said impatiently. “But look at the recognition mark on the side of the turret.”
Rolf looked. His jaw dropped. “Donnerwetter,” he muttered. Had he been a Catholic, he might have crossed himself.
“Uh-huh.” Gustav nodded. The mark wasn’t the white American star or the blue-and-white roundel the English were using these days. It was a white-edged black cross, as familiar to Gustav as the scar on the back of his left hand. “We’ve got our own panzers again! Panzers with Germans in them! See how the Russians like that!”
Max Bachman had less nationalistic fervor than Gustav (to say nothing of Rolf), and more hard common sense. “They’re only Shermans,” he said. “Ivan will like it fine. The Germans in those Shermans? Maybe not so much. It’s murder to send them out against T-54s.”
“Probably just what the Americans have in mind,” Rolf said. “What do you want to bet? Plenty of us have been yelling to get a chance in panzers again. So they give us what we say we want—and they get rid of our panzer crews as fast as we can train ’em. These are what we’ve got left, they’ll say. Take ’em or leave ’em. Of course we take ’em. And of course we pay the price.”
That was the most ridiculous thing Gustav had ever heard…till he thought about it for a little while. The more he did, the more of a certain kind of sense it made. Germans these days, like children growing away from the dark times of the Third Reich, did want to do as much for themselves as they could. How could the Americans help but worry that their allies would get too big for their britches and see that they were the strongest power in Western Europe even now?
Panzers? You need panzers? Here, we’ll give you some Shermans. They weren’t much good in the
last war. They wouldn’t have been any good at all if we hadn’t made a million of ’em. But we did, and so we’ve still got a bunch in storage. Go ahead, use ’em. And if your crews die like ants at an anteaters’ picnic, well, just remember, you asked for it.
Max’s face said he was going through similar mental contortions. After a few seconds, he said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Why the hell not?” Rolf demanded. “The Führer would have done it. Stalin would do it. Christ, Stalin is doing it. The Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians, their shit isn’t near as good as what the Russians use. You think that’s an accident?”
“No. But I spent five years in Fulda dealing with the Amis,” Max answered. “They don’t play that kind of deep game. It’s hard to get them to worry about day after tomorrow, let alone about what they do now will mean ten years down the road.”
“What about the Marshall Plan?” Gustav said.
“Mm, there is that,” Max admitted. “The Marshall Plan’s about as long-term as anything a good Communist would do. Most of the time, though, the Yankees are plenty good at tactics and not so hot with strategy.”
Another German Sherman rattled by the shell hole the soldiers shared. The commander rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, the way the man in charge of a panzer should have. He looked no more than twenty years old, and as proud of himself as if he’d invented the machine he rode in.
Nodding in his direction, Gustav said, “Max, I’d find it easier to go along with you if that guy were an old sweat like us. But a Feld who was in charge of a Panzer IV the last time would know better than to climb into that motorized herring tin now.”
“You’re right,” Rolf said. That wasn’t the kind of encouragement Gustav wanted, but he had it whether he wanted it or not.
A sergeant trotted along with the panzers. He scowled at the soldiers sitting in the hole in the ground with cigarettes in their mouths. “Come on, darlings!” he called shrilly, and blew them a kiss. “You’re invited to the dance, too.”
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