Two Fronts twtce-5

by Harry Turtledove

  An old man came up the side street carrying a stringbag with a few wizened little potatoes and a head of cabbage in it. He limped the same way Sarah’s father did. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d also got shot in the last war.

  Behind horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes flicked to the yellow star she wore. As they passed each other, he spoke in a low voice: “The SS is our misfortune!” He stumped on. Sarah stared after him in astonishment, but he didn’t look back. He just kept walking.

  After a moment, so did she. What else could she do? But if he took the Nazis’ favorite anti-Semitic slogan and aimed it at their enforcers … If he did that, he couldn’t be the only one thinking such things. Nowhere close, in fact. And if he was nowhere close to the only one thinking such things, well, no wonder the Party needed to flood Munster with SS men and mount machine guns in front of the cathedral.

  Could the Reich fight its foreign enemies and its own people at the same time? Wasn’t that how, or part of how, Kaiser Wilhelm’s government came to grief? Whether it was or not, Hitler seemed determined to try. The Fuhrer always seemed determined. Right? If you believed Goebbels, he was. Of course, if you believed Goebbels you were bound to have other things wrong with you as well.

  She hadn’t got far past the old man who didn’t like the regime when another blackshirt shouted at her: “Show me your papers, kike!”

  “Yes, sir.” Letting them see they’d got your goat meant they’d won a point. She meekly produced her identity card. He scowled at it, but even he didn’t have the gall to claim it was out of order. Scowling still, he thrust it back at her and waved her on.

  Clocks rang five throughout the city. The bells in the cathedral tower stayed silent. They’d been silent since the latest riot. The Nazis wouldn’t let anyone in to ring them.

  These were the hours when Jews could come out and shop. They couldn’t get much, but they could shop. Not even Aryans could get much. As it had in the last war, the Royal Navy’s blockade squeezed Germany like a python. The coils might not get stronger all the time, but they never got weaker.

  Even the mangel-wurzels looked sad. She got some anyway. Mangel-wurzels were what you ate when things like turnips and rutabagas cost too much … or when they were the only vegetables left in the bins. Today, they were. Unless Father had had a good day scavenging, meals for the next little while would be even grimmer than usual.

  Sarah managed to get home with only one more SS man swearing at her. The way things had been lately, that counted as a pretty good outing. Father came in not long after she got back. He hid no goodies under his jacket. Spreading his callused hands in apology, he said, “We were repairing a crater in the street today. No chance to go hunting.”

  “Too bad,” Sarah said. “Nothing but rubbish in the stores.”

  “That is too bad,” Father agreed. “But did you notice the moon’s just about full?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t pay any attention to it.”

  “It’s a bombers’ moon, all right.” Father sounded pleased at the prospect. “We’ll see if they come over tonight. We’ll see what they hit if they do. And we’ll see how brave all the heroes new in town are if the RAF does decide to pay us a call.”

  “Some of them will come from places like Dresden and Weimar, won’t they?” Sarah said. “Places that don’t get bombed much.”

  “That’s what I’m looking at, too.” Yes, Samuel Goldman seemed to be looking forward to the RAF’s arrival. The bombs didn’t care that he was a Jew. They’d kill him as readily as they’d blow up an Aryan-more readily, because Aryans had better shelters. All the same, he went on, “Let’s see how they like it here in the northwest, where we know there’s a war on all the time.”

  Sarah told him about the man who’d said what he thought of the SS. “I have no idea who he was, but he knew what I was, sure enough.”

  “It’s that intriguing?” Father said. “I wonder how many more there are like him.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “If the bombers do show up, maybe something will come down in the cathedral square. Wouldn’t it be terrible if that happened?”

  “Dreadful,” Father said. They winked at each other. He went on, “And I’ve got a story of my own to tell.”

  Before he could, Mother called, “Supper’s ready!” from the kitchen.

  She was a good cook. When you were fighting against miserable ingredients, that helped only so much. Cattle ate turnip greens. As with mangel-wurzels, so did people who couldn’t get anything better. It didn’t make them tasty. Sarah didn’t see how anything could.

  After a while, she asked her father, “So what’s your story?”

  “Story?” Mother said.

  “The one I was going to tell before I got invited to this feast,” Father said. Mother looked wounded. He backtracked in a hurry: “I’m sorry, Hanna. It was a joke, but I guess not a good one.”

  “No,” she said tightly. “Not. I’m doing the best I can, and I wish someone would notice once in a while.”

  “We do,” Father said. Sarah nodded. Mother still didn’t look happy. Father sighed. “Well, I stuck my foot in that. Do you want to hear the story in spite of everything?”

  “Please.” Sarah grabbed at anything that might turn the subject.

  “All right, then.” Before Father started, he made a small production of rolling himself an after-dinner cigarette. Once he’d taken a puff or two, he said, “I was talking with another guy in the gang-Emil, his name is. He’s a pickpocket-a good pickpocket, too.”

  “Not good enough to keep from getting caught,” Sarah observed.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Father said. “Anyway, though, he’s got a cousin who’s a Feldwebel in Holland, and he says his cousin says the Nazis asked the Wehrmacht to sit on Munster because things were getting lively here, and the Wehrmacht flat-out said no. I have no idea whether it’s true, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “How could his cousin know something like that?” Sarah asked.

  “Maybe he works the phones at the HQ of a division that would have occupied us. Maybe he plays skat with a lieutenant who’s a general’s son. I can think of ways,” Father said. “Or maybe Emil was making up the whole thing. That wouldn’t surprise me too much, either. So take it for what you think it’s worth.”

  Not knowing Emil, Sarah wasn’t sure what it might be worth. But if there was a rift between Party and Army … Father was right. It did make you think.

  Chapter 26

  Nothing in Spain ever happened in a hurry. Vaclav Jezek had had to get used to that, no matter how crazy it drove him. Yes, he was a proud Czech. Yes, he hated Germany and everything Germany stood for these days. But German attitudes had rubbed off on his country, and on him. When a Czech said something would happen today, he meant it would damn well happen today, and not Tuesday a fortnight.

  Spain, even Republican Spain (which tried to be efficient but had no idea how), didn’t work like that. The people in Madrid who ran things needed a while to hear that he’d smashed up the Spanish tankettes. They needed a while to decide how excited to get about that-they didn’t have a bounty on tankettes, the way they had on the late, unlamented (on this side of the barbed wire, anyhow) General Franco. And, once they had decided, what they’d decided needed a while to get to Vaclav.

  He’d been issued a commendation for a brave and selfless service to the Republic. The gaudy commendation was on paper too thick and too crisp to do duty as either a cigarette wrapper or an asswipe. It was written in a language he couldn’t read; Benjamin Halevy had translated it for him. It was, in other words, almost extravagantly useless.

  But it came with a medium-sized wad of pesetas-not nearly so many as he’d got for giving Franco what he deserved, but definitely better than no pesetas-and a week’s leave in Madrid. All things considered, Vaclav wished Sanjurjo’s men would throw tankettes at the Republican line more often.

  Instead of staying in a barracks, he’d spent some o
f the pesetas for a room at a hotel that hadn’t been bombed in a couple of years. He’d spent some more at a different kind of house around the corner. And he’d bought himself a bottle of what claimed to be cognac and was bound to be strong if not smooth.

  Now he walked into yet another different kind of building. In spite of a wonderful hot shower, in spite of getting his uniform cleaned, he still felt grubby going up the stairs. A woman typed at a desk in the lobby. He walked over to her.

  She looked up and rattled rapid-fire Spanish at him. His own remained rudimentary. “Chaim Weinberg? What room, por favor?” he asked.

  She flipped through a card file. He felt like cheering-she’d understood him! She found the card she needed and answered him. The only trouble was, he couldn’t understand her.

  “?Que?” he said. She repeated herself. He still didn’t get it. Her nostrils flared in exasperation. Then she had a brainstorm. She wrote the number down: 374. He grinned and nodded. “?Gracias!” he exclaimed. When you had only a few words, you’d better make them count.

  “De nada, Senor,” she replied. He actually got that. She pointed him toward the stairway. There was also an elevator, but it didn’t seem to be working. Whether that was war damage or Spanish fecklessness, he couldn’t have said. He had no trouble ascending. Getting wounded men up there might not be so easy, though.

  He found room 374. Weinberg had it to himself, which definitely made him a special case. He wore a white hospital gown. His left hand was decked out in as many bandages as a mummy. When Vaclav walked in, Chaim’s engagingly ugly mug, which had looked bored, lit up like an electric sign.

  “Hey! What are you doing here, man?” The American International’s Yiddish was hard for Jezek to follow, but he got the drift.

  And Weinberg would be able to make sense of his German, too: “I heard you got hurt. I have some leave, and I wanted to see how you were.”

  “Thanks, pal. That’s nice-that’s mighty nice,” Weinberg said. His smile faded. “I’m lucky to be here at all. One of my oldest buddies was just back from another wound, and the same mortar bomb that wrecked my hand went and did him in.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s very hard-I know.” Vaclav pointed to the shrouded hand. “How bad is it?”

  “I’m damn lucky to have it at all. They almost took it off at the aid station. But one of the docs here, all he does is fix up hands. He’s putting it together one step at a time, like. When he gets done, he thinks it’ll be pretty good. Not like it’s fresh out of the box, but pretty good.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Now Vaclav understood why Weinberg rated a private room. If he was a fancy sawbones’ pet guinea pig, they’d treat him well-when they weren’t cutting him open, anyhow. “So you have a little something to celebrate, anyhow.”

  “I would’ve celebrated a dud a hell of a lot more, but yeah,” Weinberg said. “How come?”

  Vaclav held up the bottle of alleged cognac. “I brought something to celebrate with.”

  “I’m single again. You want to marry me?” the American said.

  Laughing, Vaclav shook his head. “I’m not that desperate, thanks.” He pulled the cork out of the bottle and sniffed. Rotgut, sure as hell. Well, he hadn’t expected anything else. He raised the bottle. “Here’s to you!” He drank. It was strong, all right, strong enough to put hair on a nun’s chest.

  “Let me have some!” Weinberg said. His larynx worked as he swallowed. “Whoo!” He eyed the bottle with respect as he gave it back.

  “I would have liked something better, but this is what I could get,” Vaclav said.

  “Hey, I’m not kvetching, believe me,” Weinberg answered. Vaclav figured out the word he didn’t know from context. The American went on, “This is the first booze I’ve had since I got hurt. It’s not exactly on the hospital menu.”

  “I believe that,” Jezek said. “How good will your hand be, and when does the doctor here get through with it?”

  “Good enough to use some, I guess. Better than the mess it was when I got here, I’ll tell you that. If I were a lefty, I really would’ve been yentzed,” Weinberg said, and again the Czech worked out an unfamiliar word’s likely meaning. Weinberg continued, “Not as strong as it used to be, not as-as cunning, either. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.’ ”

  “You come out with that?” Vaclav stared at him. “You’re a Red, right?”

  “Sure I’m a Red.” Weinberg sounded proud of it, too-proud and faintly embarrassed at the same time. “I haven’t thought about any of that shit since I got bar mitzvahed to shut my old man up and he let me quit going to cheder.”

  “To what?” Vaclav couldn’t unravel that one.

  “Hebrew lessons. Religious lessons,” Weinberg said. “But some of it stuck after all. What are you gonna do? Everybody’s mind is like a rubbish heap, and sometimes the crap at the bottom floats to the top some kind of way.”

  Is my mind a rubbish heap? Vaclav wondered. He didn’t want to think so. When he considered some of the weird, useless stuff he remembered, though, while things he should have recalled slipped right out of his head, he couldn’t very well claim the American International was wrong. He didn’t even try. He took another slug of flamethrower fuel instead.

  “Me?” Chaim Weinberg said plaintively. Vaclav gave him the bottle. He drank from it, coughed, thumped his chest with his good hand, and gave it back. “Thanks, friend. You’re good in my book. Y’know, this here is far and away the longest I’ve been out of the line since I got to Spain in ’36.”

  Not many people had been fighting longer than Vaclav. Some Chinese and Japanese, some Spaniards, and a handful of Internationals like Weinberg. “It seems like I’ve carried a rifle my whole life,” Vaclav said. “If the fighting ever stops, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

  “Me, neither,” Weinberg agreed. “That’s why I want to get patched up-so I can go on doing what I’ve been doing.”

  ?Viva la muerte! Here’s to death! One of Marshal Sanjurjo’s generals was supposed to have used that for a toast. Most people who heard it thought it was disgusting and barbarous. Vaclav did, too … after a fashion. But he also understood it in ways most people didn’t, never would, and never could. Plainly, so would Weinberg. Like that goddamn Fascist, by now they were both creatures of the war, shaped in its image.

  Between them, the two creatures of the war ended up killing the bottle.

  The Gestapo man reminded Julius Lemp of a wall lizard, even though he wasn’t green. He blinked very slowly, and he kept licking his thin lips with a pointed tongue. He made more trouble than a wall lizard ever dreamt of doing, though.

  Blink. “You have aboard your ship, the U-30, an electrician’s mate named”-blink, lick-“Eberhard Nehring.” Blink.

  “That’s right. What about it?” Lemp tried to hide his contempt. The wall lizard with the high-crowned cap didn’t even know submarines were styled boats, not ships.

  “I will tell you what about it,” the Gestapo man answered coldly. Lick. Blink. “You are to leave him ashore here at Wilhelmshaven when your ship puts to sea on its next cruise.”

  “What? What the hell for?” Lemp yipped. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen for squeezing extra time and extra juice from the batteries. I need him, dammit.”

  “You may not have him.” Lick. “He is”-blink-“politically unreliable.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Lemp said. “What’s he going to do? Scuttle the boat?” He did it right, not that the blackshirt would notice. “Knock my radioman over the head with a spanner and signal the Royal Navy where we’re at?”

  The Gestapo man eyed him as if he were a fat, foolish grasshopper just about within snapping-up range. “I am not required to explain to you the details. The fact is sufficient.” Blink.

  “Quatsch!” Lemp retorted. “If I leave Nehring ashore, I’ll have to put to sea with some half-assed Dummkopf on his first patrol. And that kind of numbskull is liable to get me sunk. So you can ex
plain or you can go fuck yourself.”

  When the Gestapo man blinked this time, it was in amazement, and not nearly so mannered as usual. “I could kill you for that, and I would not even have to fill out a report,” he said, in a voice even more frigid than usual.

  He was trying to put Lemp in fear. He needed to try harder. Lemp laughed at him. “Listen to me, man. The ocean can kill me. My own lousy boat can kill me. The enemy can kill me. So why the devil should I worry about you? If you don’t level with me, I’m damned if I’ll pay any attention to you.”

  “Notes on this conversation will go into your promotion jacket.” Lick.

  Lemp laughed again, raucously. “Like I care!” He hadn’t expected to make lieutenant commander. He knew he’d never see commander. Blink. “You are being difficult.”

  “You should talk! If you don’t give me some halfway decent reason for leaving Nehring ashore, I’m going to take him with me, and you can pound sand up your ass. He’s that good.”

  Maybe the Gestapo man wasn’t used to running into somebody who didn’t turn to gelatin around him. He licked his lips once more, this time in what looked like real distress. “Oh, very well. He is engaged in correspondence of questionable loyalty with his family in Munster.” By the way the blackshirt said it, Munster was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah as a den of iniquity, and Nehring a nastier deviant than someone who snatched little girls off the sidewalk and did horrible things to them.

  “What’s the big deal about Munster?” Lemp asked.

  “In Munster, they have twice made insurrection against the Reich.” Blink. “Twice!”

  “Was Nehring involved in any of this?”

  “No, but”-lick-“his letters clearly show his awareness. He cannot be relied upon to serve the Fuhrer as he should.”

  “I’ve relied on him to serve Germany for two or three years now,” Lemp said. “He’s done it, too, and done it damn well.”

  “They are not the same thing.” Blink. The Gestapo man sounded sure.

  “Of course they are!” So did Lemp.