“That, at the moment, is the least of our worries,” Heinrich Jager answered. He hefted the Schmeisser that had belonged to Dieter Schmidt. Schmidt himself had lain under the black soil of the Ukraine for the past two days. Jäger hoped he and Schultz had heaped on enough to keep the wild dogs from tearing up the body, but he wasn’t sure. He and his gunner had been in a hurry.
Schultz’s chuckle had a bitter edge to it. “Ja, we’re a pair out of a jumble sale, aren’t we?”
“You can say that again,” Jäger answered. Both men wore scavenged infantry helmets and infantry tunics of field gray rather than tanker’s black; Schultz, carried an infantry rifle as well. Jager’s new, bristly beard itched all the time. Schultz complained about his, too. It was coming in carroty red, though his hair was light brown. Any inspector who saw them would have locked them in the guardhouse and thrown away the key.
Tankmen are usually neat to the point of fussiness. A tank without things stowed just so, and with working parts dirty and poorly maintained, is a tank waiting for breakdown or blowup. But Jager had jettisoned spit and polish when he bailed out of his killed Panzer III. His Schmeisser was clean. So was his pistol. Past that, he’d stopped worrying. He was alive, and for a German on the south Russian steppe, that remained no small achievement.
As if to remind him he was still alive, his stomach growled. The last time he’d been full was the night he got a bellyful of kasha, the night before the Lizards came. He knew what he had in the way of rations: nothing. He knew what Schultz had: the same.
“We have to get something from that collective farm,” he said. “Take it by force, sneak, up in the night, or go up and beg—I don’t much care which any more. But we have to eat.”
“I’m damned if I want to be a chicken thief,” Schultz said. Then, more pragmatically, he added, “Shouldn’t be too hard, just going on in. Most of the men, they’ll be off at the front.”
“That’s true,” Jäger said; almost all the figures he saw working in the field wore babushkas. “But this is Russia, remember. Even the women carry rifles. I’d sooner get something peaceably than by robbery. With the Lizards all around, we may need help from the Ivans.”
“You’re the officer,” Schultz said, shrugging.
Jäger knew what he meant: you’re the one who gets paid to think. Trouble was, he didn’t know what to think. The Lizards were at war with Russia no less than with the Reich, which meant he and these kolkhozniks shared a common foe. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard anything to let him know Germany and the Soviet Union weren’t still fighting each other (for that matter, he hadn’t heard anything at all since his panzer died).
He got to his feet. The south Russian steppe had seemed overpoweringly vast when he traversed it in a tank. Now that he was on foot, he felt he could tramp the gently rolling country forever without coming to its end.
Georg Schultz stood up beside him, though the gunner muttered, “Might as well be a bug walking across a plate.” That was the other side of Russia’s immensity: if one could see a long way, one could be seen just as far.
The peasants spotted the two Germans almost instantly; Jager saw their movements turn jerky even before they swung his way. He kept his submachine gun lowered as he strode toward the cluster of thatch-roofed wooden buildings that formed the heart of the kolkhoz. “Let’s keep this peaceful, if we can.”
“Yes, sir,” Schultz said. “If we can’t, no matter what we take from the Ivans now, they’re liable to stalk us through the grass and kill us.”
“Just what I’m thinking,” Jager agreed.
The workers in the fields converged on the Germans. None of them put down their hoes and spades and other tools. Several, young women and old men, carried firearms—pistols stuck in belts, a couple of rifles slung over shoulders. Some of the men would have seen action in the previous war. Jager thought he and Schultz could have taken the lot of them even so, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way.
He turned to the gunner. “Do you speak any Russian?”
“Ruki verkh!—hands up! That’s about it. How about you, sir?”
“A little more. Not much.”
A short, swag-bellied fellow marched importantly up to Jager. It really was a march, with head thrown back, arms pumping, legs snapping forward one after the other. The kolkhoz chairman, Jager realized. He rattled off a couple of sentences that might have been in Tibetan for all the good they did the major.
Jäger did know one word that might come in handy here. He used it: “Khleb—bread.” He rubbed his belly with the hand that, wasn’t holding the Schmeisser.
All the kolkhozniks started talking at once. The word “Fritz” came up in the gabble, again and again; it was almost the only word Jäger understood. It made him smile—the exact Russian equivalent of the German slang “Ivan.”
“Khleb, da,” the chairman said, a broad grin of relief on his wide, sweaty face. He spoke another word of Russian, one Jager didn’t know. The German shrugged, kept his features blank. The chairman tried again, this time in halting German: “Milk?”
“Spasebo,” Jäger said. “Thank you. Da.”
“Milk?” Schultz made a face. “Me, I’d rather drink vodka—there, that’s another Russian word I know.”
“Vodka?” The kolkhoz chief grinned and pointed back toward one of the buildings behind him. He said something too rapid and complicated for Jäger to follow, but his gestures left no doubt that if the Germans wanted vodka, the collective farm could supply it.
Jäger shook his head. “Nyet, nyet,” he said. “Milk.” To his gunner, he added, “I don’t want us getting drunk here, not even a little bit. They’re liable to wait until we go to sleep and then cut our throats.”
“Likely you’re right, sir,” Schultz said. “But still—milk? I’ll feel like I’m six years old again.”
“Stick to water, then. We’ve been drinking it for a while now, and we haven’t come down with a flux yet.” Jäger was thankful for that. He’d been cut off from the medical service ever since the battle—skirmish, he supposed, was really a better word for it—that cost his company its last panzers. If he and Schultz hadn’t stayed healthy, their only chance was to lie down and hope they got better.
Another old woman—a babushka in the grandmotherly sense of the word—hobbled toward the Germans. In her apron she carried several rings of dark, chewy-looking bread. Jäger’s stomach growled the second he saw it.
He took two rings. Schultz took three. It was food fit for peasants, he knew; back in Münster, before the war, he would have turned up his nose at black bread. But compared to some of the things he’d eaten in Russia—and especially compared to nothing at all, of which he’d had far too much lately—it was manna from heaven.
Georg Schultz somehow managed to cram a whole ring of bread into his mouth at once. His cheeks bulged until he looked like a snake trying to swallow a fat toad. The kolkhozniks giggled and nudged one another. The gunner, his face beatific, ignored them. His jaws worked and worked. Every so often, he swallowed. His enormous cud of bread began to shrink.
“That’s not the best way to do it, Sergeant,” Jäger said. “See, I’ve almost managed to finish both of mine while you were eating that one.”
“I was too hungry to wait,” Schultz answered blurrily—his mouth was still pretty full.
The babushka went away, came back with a couple of carved wooden mugs of milk. It was so fresh, it warmed Jäger’s cup. Its creamy richness went well with the earthy, mouth-fifing taste of the bread. Peasants’ food, yes, but a peasant who ate it every day was likely to be a contented man.
For politeness’ sake, Jäger declined more, though he could have eaten another two dozen rings—or so he thought—without filling himself up. He drained the mug of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, asked the kolkhoz chief the most important question he could think of: “Eidechsen?” He necessarily used the German word for Lizards; he did not know how to say it in Russian. He waved his hand along the h
orizon to show he wanted to find out where the aliens were.
The kolkhozniks didn’t get it. Jäger pantomimed short creatures, imitated the unmistakable screech of their airplanes as best he could. The kolkhoz chief’s eyes lit up. “Ah—yasheritsi,” he said. The peasants clustered round him exclaimed. Jäger memorized the word; he had the feeling he would need it again.
The chief pointed south. Jäger knew there were Lizards in that direction; that was the way he’d come. Then the chief pointed east, but made pushing motions with his hands, as if to say the Lizards over there weren’t close. Jäger nodded to show he understood. And then the kolkhoz chief pointed west. He didn’t do any dumb show to indicate the Lizards thereabouts were far away, either.
Jäger looked at Georg Schultz. Schultz was looking at him, too. He suspected he looked as unhappy as the gunner did. If there were Lizards between them and the bulk of the Wehrmacht … Jäger didn’t care to follow that thought to its logical conclusion. For that matter, if there were Lizards over that way, the Wehrmacht might not have much left in the way of bulk.
The kolkhoz chief gave him another piece of bad news: “Berlin kaput, Germanski. Yasheritsi.” He used those expressive hands of his to show the city going up in a single huge explosion.
Schultz grunted as if he’d been kicked in the belly. Jäger felt hollow and empty inside, himself. He couldn’t imagine Berlin gone, or Germany with Berlin gone. He tried not to believe it. “Maybe they’re lying,” Schultz said hoarsely. “Maybe it’s just the God-damned Russian radio.”
“Maybe.” But the more Jäger studied the kolkhozniks, the less he believed that. If they’d gloated at his reaction to the news, he would have doubted them more, have thought they were trying to fool him. But while a few looked pleased at his discomfiture (as was only natural, when his country and theirs had spent a year locked in a huge, vicious embrace), most looked at him and his companion with sympathetic eyes and somber faces. That convinced him he needed to worry.
He found a useful Russian word: “Nichevo.” He knew he pronounced it badly; German had to use the clumsy letter-group tsch even to approximate the sound that lay at its heart.
But the kolkhozniks understood. “Tovarisch, nichevo,” one of them said: Comrade, it can’t be helped, there’s nothing to be done about it. It was a very Russian word indeed: the Russians were—and needed to be—long on resignation.
He hadn’t quite meant it that way. He explained what he had meant: “Berlin da, yasheritsi—” He ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Berlin nyet, yasheritsi—” He ground his heel into the dirt again.
Some of the Russians clapped their hands, admiring his determination. Some looked at him as if he was crazy. Maybe I am, Jäger thought. He hadn’t imagined anyone could hurt Germany as the Lizards had hurt it. Poland, France, and the Low Countries had gone down like ninepins. England fought on, but was walled away from Europe. And though the Soviet Union remained on its feet, Jäger was sure the Germans would have finished it by the end of 1942. The fighting south of Kharkov showed the Ivans hadn’t learned much, no matter how many of them there were.
But the Lizards—the Lizards were an imponderable. They weren’t the soldiers they might have been, but their gear was so good it didn’t always matter. He’d found that out for himself, the hard way.
A faint buzz in the sky, far off to northward. Jager’s head whipped around. Any sky noise was alarming these days, doubly so when it might come from an almost invulnerable Lizard aircraft. This, though, was no Lizard plane. “Just one of the Ivans’ flying sewing machines, Major—not worth jumping out of your skin for.”
“Anything that’s up there without a swastika on it makes me nervous.”
“Can’t blame you for that, I guess. But if we aren’t safe from the Red Air Force here in the middle of a kolkhoz, we aren’t safe anywhere.” The tank gunner ran a hand along his gingery whiskers. “Of course, these days we really aren’t safe anywhere.”
The Soviet biplane didn’t go into a strafing run, although Jäger saw it carried machine guns. It skimmed over the collective farm, a couple of hundred meters off the ground. Its little engine did indeed make a noise like a sewing machine running flat out.
The plane banked, turned in what looked like an impossibly tight circle, came back over the knot of people gathered around the two Germans. This time it flew lower. Several kolkhozniks waved up at the pilot, who was clearly visible in the open cockpit, goggles, leather flying helmet, and all.
The biplane banked once more, now north of the collective farm again. When it turned once more, it was plainly on a landing run. Dust spurted up as its wheels touched the ground. It bounced along, slowed to a stop.
“Don’t know as how I like this, sir,” Schultz said. “Dealing with the Russians here is one thing, but that plane, that’s part of the Red Air Force. We shouldn’t have anything to do with something connected to the Bolshevik government like that.”
“I know we shouldn’t, Sergeant, but everything’s gone to hell since the Lizards got here,” Jäger answered. “Besides, what choice have we?” Too many kolkhozniks carried guns to let him think about hijacking the toy plane with the red star on its flank, even assuming he knew how to fly it—which he didn’t.
The pilot was climbing out of the plane, putting his booted foot in the stirrup on the side of the dusty fuselage below his seat. His boot, his seat? No, Jäger saw: a blond braid stuck out under the back of the flying helmet, and the cheeks under those goggles (now shoved up onto the top of the flying helmet) had never known—or needed—a razor. Even baggy flying clothes could not long conceal a distinctly unmasculine shape.
Schultz saw the same thing at the same time. His long jaw worked as if he were about to spit, but he had sense enough to remember where he was and think better of it. Disgust showed in his voice instead: “One of their damned girl fliers, sir.”
“So she is.” The pilot was coming their way. Jäger made the best of a situation worse than he really cared for: “Rather a pretty one, too.”
Ludmila Gorbunova skimmed over the steppe, looking for Lizards or anything else interesting. No matter what she found, she wouldn’t be able to report back to her base unless the emergency was great enough to make passing along her knowledge more important than coming home. Planes that used radios in flight all too often stopped flying immediately thereafter.
She was far enough south to start getting alert—and worried—when she spotted a crowd around a collective farm’s core buildings at a time when most of the kolkhozniks should have been in the fields. That in itself wasn’t so unusual, but then she caught a glint of light reflecting up from a couple of helmets. As the angle at which she viewed them shifted, she saw they were blackish gray, not the dun color she had expected.
Germans. Her lip twisted. What the Soviet government had to say about Germans had flip-flopped several times over the past few years. They’d gone from being bloodthirsty fascist beasts to peace-loving partners in the struggle against imperialism and then, on June 22, 1941, back to being beasts again, this time with a vengeance.
Ludmila heard the endless droning propaganda, noted when it changed, and changed her thinking accordingly. People who couldn’t do that had a way of disappearing. Of course, for the past year the Germans themselves had been worse than any propaganda about them.
She wished that meant no one in the Soviet Union had anything good to think about the Nazis. The measure of Hitler’s damnation was that imperialist England and the United States joined the Soviets in the struggle against him. The measure of the Soviet Union’s damnation (though Ludmila did not think of it in those terms) was that so many Soviet citizens—Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Byelornssian, Tatars, Cossacks, even Great Russians—collaborated with Hitler against Moscow.
Were these kolkhozniks collaborators, then? If they were, a quick pass with her machine guns would rid the world of a fair number of them. But the line from Radio Moscow on Germany had changed yet again since the Lizards cam
e. They were not forgiven their crimes (no one who had fled from them would ever forgive their crimes), but they were at least human. If they cooperated with Soviet forces against the invaders from beyond the moon, they were not to be harmed.
So Ludmila’s forefinger came off the firing button. She swung the Kukuruznik back toward the collective farm for a closer look. Sure enough, those were Germans down there. She decided to land and try to find out what they were up to.
Only when the U-2 was bumping along the ground to a stop did it occur to her that, if the kolkhozniks were collaborators, they would not want a report going back toward Moscow for eventual vengeance. She almost took off again, but chose to stay and see what she could.
The farmers and the Germans came toward her peacefully enough. She saw several weapons in the little crowd, but none pointed at her. The Germans kept their rifle and submachine guns slung.
“Who is the chief here?” she asked.
“I am, Comrade Pilot,” said a fat little fellow who stood with his back very straight, as if to emphasize how important he was. “Kliment Yegorevich Pavlyuchenko, at your service.”
She gave her own name and patronymic, watching this Pavlyuchenko with a wary eye. He’d spoken her fair and called her “comrade,” but that did not mean he was to be trusted, not with two Germans at his elbow. She pointed at them. “How did they come to your collective farm, comrade? Do they speak any Russian?”
“The older one does, a word here and there, anyhow. The one with the red whiskers knows only how to eat. They must have been straggling a good while—they hadn’t even heard about Berlin.”
Both Germans looked at Pavlyuchenko when they heard the name of their capital. Ludmila studied them as if they really were a couple of dangerous beasts; she’d never before been close enough to see Hitlerites as individuals.
Rather to her surprise, they looked like neither the inhuman-seeming killing machines that had swept the Soviet armies east across a thousand kilometers of Russia and the Ukraine nor like Winter Fritz of recent propaganda, with a woman’s shawl round his shoulders and an icicle dangling from his nose. They were just men, a little taller, a little skinnier, a little longer-faced than Russian norms, but just men all the same. She wrinkled her nose. They smelled like men, too, men who hadn’t bathed any time lately.
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