“Well, besides that?” Fujita said.
He set Hirabayashi laughing again. “You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you?” the older man said. “That’s good. You get up into Burma’s asshole the way we are and there’s not a hell of a lot to laugh about.”
“It’s war. Shigata ga nai, neh?” Fujita said.
Sergeant Hirabayashi nodded. “No, you can’t do a damn thing about it—except drink when you get the chance.” He suited action to word.
So did Fujita, who said, “One good thing, anyhow. At least the RAF doesn’t bomb us here. When I fought the Russians in Siberia, they were always trying to drop stuff on our heads. That wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Can’t say I miss it.”
“All right. There’s something,” Hirabayashi admitted. “But I’ll tell you, it’s not much.”
“I won’t argue.” Fujita poured himself another mug of beer and downed it, and then another one after that.
He woke the next morning with a headache that pounded behind his eyes like a piledriver. Strong tea did next to nothing to fix it. One more mug of beer helped some. The headache dulled, even if it didn’t disappear. Shouting at conscript privates let him work off more of his discomfort. He wasn’t especially proud to remember that the next day, but consoled himself with the thought that he hadn’t slugged anybody.
Odds were Sergeant Hirabayashi wouldn’t have been so fussy. Noncoms like Hirabayashi would have led Japanese troops into action in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Back in samurai days, men like him would have been loyal retainers to their overlords, even if they wouldn’t have worn collar tabs back then.
If I stay in the Army as long as he has, will I end up like that? Fujita wondered. He didn’t want to be a career noncom. He wanted to go back to the family farm and spend the rest of his days there. If he never saw another rifle or another porcelain bomb casing full of germs, that suited him fine.
No matter what he wanted, though, the Army wouldn’t turn him loose till the war ended, if it ever ended. And even after he escaped its clutches, he sometimes wondered uneasily how he would fit down on the farm. He wasn’t the person he had been before conscription got him. He was harder, tougher, less patient. He’d seen more of the world than he’d even imagined while he was still a civilian. He didn’t like a lot of what he’d seen, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, his horizons had broadened. A farm off in the middle of nowhere was likely to seem a farm off in the middle of nowhere, not an unquestioned home for the rest of his life.
He didn’t know what he could do about that. No, actually he did know; he couldn’t do anything about it. Now that he’d seen the wider world, he couldn’t very well forget about it, even if he wished he could.
His father had carried a rifle in the Russo-Japanese War. Had he felt some of the same thing after he came home again? If he had, he’d managed to stifle it. Or maybe he’d just never talked about it with his family. He must have realized they wouldn’t understand.
I do now, Fujita thought. Young men all over Japan would understand after the war. The country would be different then, because they’d changed. How it would be different, Fujita wasn’t sure. But it would be.
Of course, not all of Japan’s young men in uniform would go home again. Fujita wasn’t thinking about the ones who would die in battle. Their spirits would return to the Home Islands, to live forever at the Yasukuni Shrine. But, after the war was done, how many soldiers would Japan need to protect her conquests in China and Russia and the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia and the East Indies?
Did Japan have that many soldiers? Could she maintain them without ruining herself? Fujita was tempted to laugh at himself. How could he know, when he was just an ignorant peasant bumped up to sergeant? He was surprised even the question had occurred to him.
Then he wondered if it had occurred to the people who were supposed to worry about such things. That, though, was another kind of question altogether.
SARAH BRUCK SOON SETTLED into the routine of marriage and of bakery work. If not much time seemed available for romance, well, she was usually too busy to miss it. And romance during wartime, at least for a Jew in the Reich, was a pallid, harried thing to begin with.
She did eat better than she had when she was living with her parents. But, when she wasn’t too tired, she missed the talk at their house. All the Brucks ever talked about was baking. Sarah treasured the weekend visits she and Isidor made. She was glad they intrigued her husband, too. He sensed a wider, deeper world there than the one he was used to at home.
She didn’t treasure the air raids. As nights got longer, the RAF came over Germany more and more often. Münster, in the far northwest near the Dutch border, took more than its share of pounding: it lay within easy range of England, and bombers didn’t need to fly through French airspace to reach it. Sarah could have done without the honor.
Fear iced through her every time the sirens’ screams jerked her headlong out of sleep. The Brucks had no proper shelter to go to, no more than her parents or any other German Jews did. They—and Sarah—huddled downstairs, between their shop counter and the ovens. That gave them some protection if a bomb hit above them. If one blew up in the street outside, though … She resolutely refused to worry about that. If it happened, odds were she’d be too dead to do any more worrying, anyhow.
Her father gave forth with a gravedigger’s good cheer when she and Isidor visited after a raid. “Here for a while I thought they were going to throw me off the labor gang for lack of work,” Samuel Goldman said, his eyes twinkling even though he had dark bags under them. “But we’ve had plenty to do lately.”
“I’ll bet you have!” Sarah exclaimed. “It’s been terrible.”
“An awful lot of houses knocked to smithereens,” Isidor agreed.
“Well, so there are.” Sarah’s father didn’t sound so cheery when he said that. He paused to light a cigarette. For a moment, Sarah took that for granted—but only for a moment. He didn’t roll the smoke himself, with newspaper for a wrapper and tobacco scrounged from other people’s dog-ends. No: this one was machine-made, whole and new. Seeing her stare, he nodded. “We clear the wreckage, you know. Whatever we find that we can carry away, we keep. I’m not what you’d call proud of it, but I do it just like everybody else.”
“Good for you!” Isidor answered before Sarah could. “If that’s the only choice you’ve got, you have to take it.”
“That’s what I tell myself.” Samuel Goldman nodded again. “I scavenged the same way in the trenches when we went forward. The French and the Tommies always had so much more than we did. We ate better after every advance. Mother and I are eating a little better now, too. But it feels different when you’re scavenging from the neighbors, not the enemy.”
“What else can you do?” Sarah asked sympathetically.
“I could do nothing. Then we’d starve. This is better—I suppose.” Father’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He looked up toward the ceiling, or maybe toward whatever lay a mile beyond the moon, as he continued, “A lot of the time, we’re the ones who pull the bodies out of the rubble, too. I didn’t mind bodies much, you know, when they wore horizon-blue or khaki. I even got used to bodies in Feldgrau. Lord knows we saw enough of them. But bodies in pajamas or nightgowns? That’s a lot harder.”
Sarah and Isidor looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to know what to say to that. At last, Sarah asked, “Have you … found anyone you know? Uh, I guess I mean knew?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “You remember Friedrich Lauterbach?”
“Sure. He studied under you. He’s in the Wehrmacht now, isn’t he?” Sarah left it there. Had the world gone down a different path, she might have been more likely to marry him than the husband she had now. He’d stayed decent even after the Nazis took over, getting Father money for writing articles that would see print under his byline rather than a Jew’s. Sarah hoped he hadn’t stopped anything.
Her father nodded. “That’s the
fellow. His older brother was a doctor here. Was.” He repeated the past tense. Something in the way his jaw set made Sarah fight shy of asking just what had happened to the luckless Dr. Lauterbach.
Isidor yawned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll stay very late,” he said. “You have air raids two or three days in a row, you get so sleepy you can’t see straight.”
“That’s the truth!” Sarah’s mother exclaimed; she hadn’t had much to say till then. “And the horrible ersatz coffee and tea you can get nowadays don’t have any kick in them at all.” Everybody nodded at that. People grumbled about it all the time.
“They make pills for pilots and other people who’ve got to stay awake,” Father said. “Not the stuff that goes into coffee, but the real strong stuff, benzedrine and the like. Plenty of times I’ve wished I could get my hands on some of those. I could use them, believe me.”
“Who couldn’t?” Isidor said. “Dr. What’s-his-name—Lauterbach—didn’t have any at his house?”
“If he did, somebody else beat me to them. What can you do?” Samuel Goldman spread his hands. Sarah remembered when they were soft and smooth and impeccably manicured, with only a writer’s callus on one middle finger. Now they were scarred and battered, with filthy nails and with hard yellowed ridges across the palms. Well, her own hands were a lot harder than they had been, too.
She and Isidor got back to the flat over the bakery well before curfew. In lieu of benzedrine pills, they went to bed early. Sarah thought she could sleep the clock around if she got the chance. Tired by bad food and nighttime air raids, she wanted to hibernate like a dormouse.
She didn’t get the chance that night. The RAF came over again, a little before midnight. The sirens wailed like damned souls. Sarah and Isidor and the older Brucks did some heartfelt damning of their own as they stumbled down the stairs in darkness absolute.
Then the bombs whistled down. As soon as Sarah heard them, her terror redoubled. They sounded louder and closer than they ever had before. She tried to burrow into the floor when they started going off.
It sounded as if one hit right across the street. The window in the front of the bakery had survived the whole war. It didn’t survive this: it fell in on itself with a tinkling crash. “Scheisse!” Isidor’s father said loudly, and then, “I beg your pardon.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sarah said as the building shook from other hits only a little farther away. Now she understood why her own father still sometimes called bomber pilots air pirates even though the name came straight out of Dr. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. If they were trying to kill you, they weren’t your friends.
After forty-five eternal minutes, the bombers droned away. “That was awful,” Isidor said. Sarah couldn’t have put it better herself. She shivered, not just from fear but also because the shattered front window was letting in cold air.
It was letting in light, too. The grocery across the street was on fire. Isidor’s father started to go out to see if he could help. Stepping on broken glass made him change his mind in a hurry.
There wasn’t much water pressure when a fire engine finally clanged up. What had the bombs done to the pipes under Münster? Nothing good—that was plain. Firemen in what looked like Stahlhelms with crests did the best they could with what they had.
“He’s going to lose everything,” David Bruck said gloomily. “I just hope he’s alive. He’s a goy, but he’s a mensh. The two shops have been across the street from each other as long as I can remember.”
“It’s terrible,” Sarah said.
“It’s worse than that,” her father-in-law answered. “For him and for us. I know I won’t be able to get glass to fix that window. Heaven only knows if they’ll even give me wood scraps. I’ve got to have something, or people will just come in and steal. How am I supposed to stay in business?”
When Sarah decided to marry Isidor, she’d figured that getting into a baker’s family would at least mean she had enough to eat. Now even that wasn’t obvious any more. She suddenly hated the RAF almost as if she were a genuine German after all.
ANASTAS MOURADIAN LAY in his tent, trying to sleep. He had his flying suit of fur and leather, and long underwear below it. He had two thick, scratchy woolen blankets. He had a cot that kept him off the ground. The tent itself held off the worst of the wind. He was miserably cold even so.
Russian infantrymen learned to sleep in the snow, shrouded by no more than their uniform and greatcoat. Stas was no foot soldier; he was a flyer. He was no Russian, either. He knew what good weather was all about. When it got this frigid, his teeth chattered like castanets.
Then the tent flap flew open. A blast of air straight from the North Pole rushed inside. So did a human shape—no more than a lumpy outline in the darkness. “What the devil—?” Stas said, groping for his service pistol.
“You’ve got to hide me!”
The voice was familiar. Stas stopped feeling for the automatic. “What do you mean, hide you, Ivan? Hide you from whom?” he asked. Having learned Russian as a second language, he was often more precise in his grammar than men who’d spoken it from birth.
But Ivan Kulkaanen wasn’t a native Russian-speaker, either. “Hide me from the Chekists! They’re after me!” The Karelian’s voice wasn’t just familiar. It was desperate. He panted like a hunted animal worn down after a long chase.
Now the ice that ran up Mouradian’s back had nothing to do with the arctic air rapidly filling the tent. “Bozhemoi!” he burst out. “What did you do? What do they think you did?” The questions were related, but not necessarily identical. And the second was the one that really mattered. If the NKVD decided you’d done something, you might as well have, because they’d hang it on you anyway.
“I wrote in a letter to my cousin that the war wasn’t going as well as it ought to be,” Kulkaanen answered miserably.
“Bozhemoi!” Stas repeated. This time, his tone was hopeless. “You wrote that?” He didn’t ask How could you be such an idiot? It had already occurred to him that his copilot and bomb-aimer might be playing a part. The NKVD might be building a case against him and using Kulkaanen as a provocateur. It struck him as unlikely—if the Chekists wanted you, more often than not they just grabbed you—but it was possible.
“I wrote it,” Ivan agreed. “I wrote it in Finnish. I didn’t think they’d ever be able to read it. But they did, and I’m fucked.” Karelia lay in the far north, next to the Finnish border. A lot of Finns thought it belonged to them by rights, not least because the only differences between Finns and Karelians were the names and where they happened to live.
Of course the NKVD would have men who read Finnish, just as the Chekists had men who read Armenian and Georgian (hell, Stalin could do that) and Azerbaijani and Kazakh and Lithuanian and every other language under the Soviet sun. The NKVD probably had men who read Sanskrit, for Christ’s sake. Hey, you never could tell when a professor of the ancient languages of India might turn wrecker on you.
“Hide me!” Kulkaanen said again, even more urgently than before. “If I can count on anybody, it’s you!”
There was a compliment Stas appreciated—and one he could have done without. “Hide you where?” he asked, doing his best to sound like the voice of sweet reason. “What do you want me to do with you, Ivan? Stick you in my back pocket?” Kulkaanen was both taller and thicker through the shoulders than he was himself.
“There’s got to be somewhere!” the Karelian said.
“Under my cot, maybe? That should fool the NKVD for a good second and a half—two if you’re lucky,” Stas said.
Kulkaanen groaned. “I’m fucked,” he said once more: an observation all too likely to be accurate. With yet another groan—or maybe this one was better called a moan—he fled out into the night.
Stas felt like groaning and moaning, too. Now he didn’t have to worry about whether the cold would keep him awake. Adrenaline would handle the job just fine. He lay there, trying without much luck to relax, heart
thuttering in his throat.
He didn’t get to lie there long. Not fifteen minutes after Ivan Kulkaanen disappeared, someone shone an electric torch full in his face and shouted, “Answer, in the name of the Soviet Union!”
Stas answered, all right: “Turn that goddamn thing off, you stupid motherfucking jackass! Do you want to bring Nazi bombers down on us?” If you were going to deal with the NKVD, any moral advantage you could grab was precious.
The torch winked off. Except for a wavering purple-green afterimage, Stas could see nothing at all for a little while. The Chekist demanded, “Did the anti-Soviet criminal Ivan Kulkaanen come here?”
“Ivan came here, yes,” Stas answered. No matter what Kulkaanen was dumb enough to put in a letter, Mouradian was sure he’d harmed the Hitlerites far more than this blustering Russian ever would. It wouldn’t help him, of course, but it was true.
“What did he want? What did you tell him?” the NKVD man barked.
“He wanted me to hide him. I said I couldn’t.” Stas gave back the exact truth. It couldn’t land poor Ivan in any more trouble.
“What did he do then?”
“He ran away. You don’t see him here, do you?”
“Never mind what I see,” the intruder snapped. “Why didn’t you instantly report his treasonous behavior?”
“Because he only just now came and went.” That was a lie, but only a tiny one. “And because it’s bloody cold out there.” Truth again. “And because I expected you people would be on his trail.” One more truth.
“Where did he go?” the NKVD man asked, so even a Chekist could see the sense in his response.
“Comrade Investigator, I have no idea,” Mouradian said, which was also true. “But wherever he is, he can’t have got far.”
“Ha! You’re right about that. And when we catch him, he’ll be sorry he didn’t run off to Venus or Mars.”
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 43