Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  Her gang got summoned next. She drew the mutilated lieutenant as her interrogator. He started in Russian, but soon saw she didn’t have enough of the language to follow his questions. She also acted dumber than she was, which turned out not to help. He switched to rasping German: “Bauer and Nekrasova were from your barracks, nicht wahr?”

  “If those were their names, sir,” Luisa answered. “I didn’t know either of them, really. They were just—faces.” That wasn’t altogether true, but the less she admitted, the better off she was.

  Or so she thought. “Then you don’t need to worry about betraying them,” the lieutenant said. “Did you hear them conspiring to steal themselves from Soviet custody?”

  Luisa thought that a peculiar way to put it, one more thing she didn’t say. She did say, truthfully, “No, sir. I paid no attention to either one of them.”

  “Then you should have. Ignorance is no excuse,” he said, glowering at her with his surviving eye. “Five days in a punishment cell to remind you to respect the Soviet state and its regulations.” He raised his ruined voice: “Guard!”

  The guard hustled her to the punishment block. The cells there were too low to stand up in and too small to lie down in. She had to fold herself up in a corner. There wasn’t even a bucket. When she needed to ease herself, she’d have to use a different corner. The stench in the cell said she wouldn’t be anywhere close to the first who had.

  She got water and black bread—precious little of either. The guards yelled abuse at her and the other luckless women in the cells both day and night. She’d never been through anything like that before. It made ordinary camp life seem like a Kraft durch Freude cruise by comparison. In her maddest nightmares, she’d never imagined anything could do that.

  When they opened the cell’s door to let her out, she had trouble crawling out. She had even more trouble standing up. The outside world was too big, too wide, too open.

  Three doors down from her, Trudl Bachman also came forth. The two women from Fulda nodded to each other. Before her confinement, Luisa had hoped the escapees got away, but she hadn’t hoped they had. Now she did, with all her might. Let them be gone for good! She was sure Trudl felt the same way.

  VASILI YASEVICH AMBLED along the road, the track, whatever you wanted to call it, that connected Smidovich and Birobidzhan. He’d never been to the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Few people from Smidovich had. Birobidzhan held thirty-five or forty thousand souls. To the locals, that made it the big city.

  It wasn’t the big city to Vasili. He was supposed to come from Khabarovsk, which had been quite a bit larger till the American A-bomb cut it down to size. And he really knew Harbin, which had been larger still. Of course, by China’s anthill standards, even Harbin was only a third- or at best a second-rate town.

  Having grown up among Harbin’s teeming hundreds of thousands, Vasili was amazed at how much he enjoyed getting off by himself. When he went a few kilometers down the road, he might have been the only man in the world. All he could hear were birdcalls, the wind soughing through the pine branches, and his own footsteps. No, he could hear one thing more. He could hear himself think in a way he couldn’t in a crowd.

  A squirrel gnawing on a pine cone paused to chatter at him. It sat on a branch fifteen meters up a tree. He couldn’t have hurt it if he tried. It told him off just the same. Then, with a flirt of its plumy tail, it was gone.

  He wagged a finger at it. “Better be careful, Tovarishch. They’ll collectivize you and your pine cones if you don’t watch out.” He could make jokes like that so long as only a squirrel heard him. If anyone in Smidovich did, he’d find out all about what they did to people.

  On he went. In a jacket pocket, wrapped in newspaper, he had a sandwich of rye bread and smoked salmon and onions. The people on this side of the Amur smeared creamy cheese on their bread when they made that kind of sandwich. He didn’t. He had the Chinese view of cheese: that it was nothing but rotten milk. If the locals noticed how he fixed his food, they might think he was odd. They wouldn’t make any more of it than that.

  There was the fallen tree he remembered, with the orange and yellow lichens growing on the trunk. It was the perfect place to sit and eat and smoke and let his thoughts go where they would for as long as they felt like going there. Then he’d get up, take a leak against a sapling, and saunter back to Smidovich.

  He’d taken two bites out of the sandwich when a noise from deeper in the woods made him turn his head away from the dirt road. Something good-sized was moving in there. People in Smidovich talked about wolves. Vasili had never seen one, or even seen tracks in the soft ground. He suspected all the talk was only that and no more.

  But he might have been wrong. He set the sandwich on the colorful tree trunk and reached for the Tokarev automatic he’d taken from Grigory Papanin. It wasn’t accurate out much farther than he could piss, but the report ought to scare away a wolf.

  Or a tiger. People in Smidovich talked about them, too. Vasili had more trouble taking that seriously. Still, his father had charged the Chinese in Harbin through the nose for medicines made from ground-up and dried tiger parts. He must have got them from somewhere.

  What came out of the forest, though, wasn’t a wolf or a tiger. It was a human being, though a scrawny one with cropped hair and such cheap, shabby clothes that Vasili wondered for a moment. Then he saw that the jacket and trousers had a number written on them: Б711. He realized what kind of human being it must be—a zek, straight out of the gulag.

  At the same time as he saw Б711, the zek saw the sandwich he’d just started and pointed at it. “Bitte? Uh, pozhalista?” the zek said. Only when Vasili heard the voice did he realize it was a women. The ragged, quilted jacket and baggy pants hid whatever curves she owned.

  “Go ahead,” he said. She had to be starving. He wouldn’t waste away for want of a smoked-salmon sandwich. He waved in invitation, in case she had trouble with his Russian—it plainly wasn’t her first language.

  “Danke schön! Bolshoye spasibo!” she said, and engulfed the sandwich like a snake engulfing a rabbit. When it was gone, her bony, filthy face lit up. “Ach, wunderbar!” She pointed at her own chest. “Ich heisse Maria Bauer.”

  “I’m Vasili,” he said. She had to be speaking German. He’d picked up a few Yiddish phrases in Smidovich, but only a few. He asked, “How much Russian do you speak?”

  She held her thumb and forefinger not far apart. “Little bit,” she said.

  Vasili nodded. “Did you run away from the gulag?” he asked. Maria Bauer looked alarmed. He held up his hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t turn you in. Fuck the Chekists!”

  That, she understood. “Fuck Chekists, da!” she said fiercely.

  “How did you get away?” he asked.

  She laughed. “I fuck Chekist. Five of us, we do. We go, we split up, they not maybe all catch. I here.” She paused. “Where here?”

  “Near Smidovich,” Vasili said. Plainly, it meant nothing to Maria.

  “What do you of me—to me—with me?” she asked. “You not give me Chekists, I you fuck, too.” With her rudimentary Russian, she couldn’t be anything but blunt.

  Right this minute, he had no trouble shaking his head. She might clean up nicely, though. Feed her, let her hair grow out, and she wouldn’t be terrible. He couldn’t take her home with him any which way, not when he lived in a dormitory. All of a sudden, he started to laugh.

  “Chto?” she asked, her voice full of animal wariness.

  “I have a friend in town.” He spoke slowly and clearly, to make sure she could follow. “I will go see him. I think—I hope—he can take you in. I will come back tonight. I will bring food. I will take you to him if he says yes. If he says no, I will give you what I can to help you get away.”

  “How I know you it?—it you?” she asked after he’d repeated himself and gestured several times.

  He whistled a tune that had been popular in Harbin before the Russians drove the Japanese out of the cit
y. “I’ll do that when I come,” he said.

  Maria Bauer nodded. “Khorosho.”

  Vasili went on whistling as he walked back to Smidovich. A couple of trucks passed him. He assumed Maria had had sense enough to hide from them. If she hadn’t, she was too dumb to deserve help.

  He knocked on David Berman’s door, hoping the old Jew hadn’t gone anywhere. Sure enough, Berman was home. “Vasili Andreyevich!” he said, smiling in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  Looking inside the cabin, Vasili saw it was even grubbier than it had been the last time he visited. “How would you like a maid to help you straighten up this joint?” he asked.

  Berman frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I met somebody in the woods….” Vasili told the whole story. If David Berman went to the MGB, he was history. But Berman didn’t seem that kind of man. Vasili was willing to take the chance.

  And the old Jew said, “Well, I got no use for Chekists or camps. Who does? But you want I should take a young girl into mine house? Into this?” His wave took in all the neglect. “And a German girl? Vey iz mir!”

  “She’s not that young, David Samuelovich. She’s my age, give or take a little,” Vasili said. “Believe me, next to the camps, what you’ve got here is great. And see? You’ll be able to talk to her better than I can. You can call her your niece or your cousin or something, visiting from the real Russia.”

  “She’s your age? That’s young. Believe me, that’s young,” Berman said. “But I’ll do it. If she gets caught, we all go to the gulag. For you, for her, it’s a worry. For me? I don’t care what happens to me no more.”

  “I’ll bring tonight,” Vasili said. “You can keep her a secret till she grows some hair and gets some clothes that don’t have a number on them.”

  He feared Maria Bauer would have fallen asleep by the time he came back up the road whistling his song. But she came out at once and walked to Smidovich with him. “A Jew?” she said when he told her David Berman’s name. “I go to a Jew?” She laughed.

  “He thinks it’s funny, too,” Vasili told her, which didn’t stretch things…too far.

  He knocked on Berman’s door. The old man opened it. Maria stumbled inside. Vasili went away. Either he’d just done something marvelous or he’d wrecked three lives. Well, you could only try.

  —

  Simon Perkins was already at work compounding medicines when Daisy Baxter came downstairs. Grinding away with a big brass mortar and pestle, he might have fallen through time from the Middle Ages. Even the faintly camphory, faintly sulfurous odor of the chemist’s shop suggested bygone days. Only his waistcoat, necktie, and gold-framed bifocals argued for 1952.

  “Good morning, Mr. Perkins,” she said, as cheerfully as she could. She didn’t feel she knew him well enough to use his Christian name. She wondered if anyone in the world did.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Baxter,” he answered, not stopping what he was doing.

  Did he bear down a bit on the title that showed she was, or at least had been, a married woman? She didn’t want him to be difficult. Yes, he was generous, to give shelter to someone who’d lived through the disaster that crushed Fakenham. But couldn’t he leave it there?

  Evidently he couldn’t, because he went on, “You got in late last night—or I should say, this morning.”

  “I’m ever so sorry if I bothered you coming up the stairs,” Daisy said, pretending not to hear any larger meanings in his remark. “I tried to be as quiet as I could.”

  “I wasn’t awake very long,” he said grudgingly. “But what can you and your Yank be doing that keeps you out till half past two?”

  He sounded as if he honestly had no idea. Daisy didn’t know whether that made her want to laugh or to cry or to do both at once. What are we doing? We’re screwing like bunnies was the first thing that leaped into her mind. However tempting it was, though, it would only make things worse.

  “We have a good time,” she said. “We enjoy each other’s company.” And the North Sea was damp, and the flash when an atom bomb went off was bright. Words were useless for some things. If you hadn’t experienced them, they couldn’t mean anything to you. She did try to sound as innocent as she could. For that, words were worth something.

  “I daresay,” Simon Perkins replied. Perhaps she sounded less innocent than she hoped.

  “It’s really between Bruce and me, don’t you think?” she said. Before he could tell her whether he did think that—she would have bet against it—she added, “I’m going out for some breakfast. I’ll see you later.”

  Out she went. She could feel his eyes boring into the small of her back like awls. She was glad to close the door behind her. She wondered whether she ought to look for another room. She didn’t want to. Even with as little in the way of worldly goods as she had, moving was a bloody nuisance. But if Mr. Perkins was going to get his nose out of joint whenever she and Bruce spent time together, she might not have a choice.

  She bought scrambled eggs and chips and her morning cuppa at a place around the corner from the chemist’s shop. She had a hot plate in her room; she could brew tea there. She could even cook if she had no other choice, but a little experimenting had shown that anything beyond tea or heating tinned soup was more trouble than it was worth.

  The town hall had gone up in the 1880s. It was brick and granite, built with smug Victorian confidence that it would still be an important place two hundred years from when it went up. Back then, the British Empire had been the unchallenged, the unchallengeable, mistress of the world. Here it was, only a lifetime later, and the Empire was a tattered ruin of its grander self. The home country, still in the grip of crippling austerity after the last war, had been hit again, harder, by this new one.

  People nowadays laughed at how smug and certain their grandparents had been. No one now was certain about anything—and how could you be, when the town where you lived might get seared out of existence in the next moment? But that sureness that their achievements would last forever made Daisy envy her ancestors…and also made her want to weep at the foundering of all their hopes.

  Inside the hall, signs with arrows directed people to where they needed to go. By now, she knew which window to visit without resorting to them. The window had a newly printed sign held in place above it by sticky tape: FAKENHAM SURVIVOR BENEFITS. This was where the government gave what it could spare to the townsfolk the Russians hadn’t managed to murder with their atom bomb.

  The clerk looked up from a form he’d been filling in. “Ah, Mrs. Baxter,” he said. “How are you this morning?” His smile and something in his voice told her he liked the way she looked.

  She smiled back, not quite with the same warmth. He was polite, which made his regard more a compliment than an annoyance. She wanted to keep it that way. “I’m fine, Mr. Jarvis, thanks,” she said. “And you?”

  “I’m very well, very well indeed,” he replied. “You’ve come for the weekly allotment?”

  “That’s right.” She wondered why else she or anyone else would come to this tan-painted, poorly lit corridor. Unless you had to be here, you’d stay as far away as you could.

  “Here you are.” He handed her an envelope. She looked inside to make sure the money the state said she was entitled to was in there. When she saw it was, she signed the line on the allotment roster that also held her typewritten name. She turned to go, but Mr. Jarvis said, “Wait a moment, please.”

  “Yes?” Now she didn’t sound one bit warm. Was he going to prove a bother after all?

  But all he did was hand her another envelope. “This came in for you yesterday. As you’ll know, the post to Fakenham has been, ah, rather badly disrupted since the, ah, unfortunate incident.”

  “The A-bomb, you mean,” she said. Government officials thought they could hide the mushroom cloud behind a thicker cloud of meaningless words.

  “Well, yes.” Mr. Jarvis didn’t care to admit it but couldn’t very well deny it.

 
; “Thank you very much,” she said, giving him credit for admitting it and more because he wasn’t in fact trying to urge himself on her.

  Sure enough, the envelope had gone to the Owl and Unicorn’s address in ruined Fakenham. It was from her insurance company. Bloody took them long enough, she thought as she opened it.

  It has come to our attention that the property at the above-mentioned address may have been adversely affected by the unfortunate events of 11 September 1951, she read. A soft snort escaped her. The insurers talked as if they wanted to be bureaucrats. She waded through a couple of paragraphs of turgid drivel before she got to the meat. As acts of war and acts of God are specifically disallowed under the provisions of Clause 6.2.3.a.3 of your policy, we regret to inform you that we have no financial obligation in the matter of damages suffered on or about the above-mentioned date in regard to the unfortunate events thereof.

  A scribbled signature followed. She read it again. No financial obligation. Yes, it still said the same thing. No, she hadn’t read it wrong. They weren’t going to pay. She only wished she were less surprised. Insurance companies were there for themselves first and you only later, if at all. They were very good at taking in premiums. Sending money the other way? That, they weren’t so happy about.

  She knew what Bruce would say if she showed him the letter. He’d note the London address and offer to make a special bombing run for her. He couldn’t do it, but the offer would be nice. Unless the government did more for her and her townsfolk than it had so far, the offer would be all she got.

  What the company said might be legal, but it hardly seemed fair. She’d just had her pub in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was that enough to ruin her for life? The insurance outfit thought so.

  With sudden startling clarity, she realized letters like hers were how the Bolsheviks got started. When the ones above you didn’t give a damn about what happened to you, what did you do? You got rid of them. Good God! I’ve just turned Red myself, Daisy thought—proudly.