Blood for Blood

by Ryan Graudin

  These parts were nightmares. They had to be.

  “We jumped out of a plane,” Luka began.

  “I remember that,” Felix said.

  The other boy shrugged. “Figured as much. But it sounds more impressive if I start off that way. Anyway, we jumped out of a plane, hiked until you went all fever crazy on us—”

  “I remember that, too.”

  “Are you going to let me tell the verdammt story or not?”

  Again Felix wanted to yell. Again hurt like knives spread up his broken fingers. Everything—inside and out—ached too much to argue, so he fixed his stare on the ceiling as Luka kept narrating his version of events. “We played house, I got a splinter chopping firewood, the Soviet army rolled in, and Yael used her nifty face-changing trick to divert them.…”

  Face-changing trick. That’s right. The girl could change faces. The old woman melting had been real. And if she was real… With a good deal of effort, Felix raised his right, bandaged hand and held it in front of his face. What he saw made no sense at all.

  The last two fingers were gone, severed at the base. Both were flaring: crushed bones, tendons on fire. Felix stared and stared. He passed his left hand over the space. It collided with nothing.

  Luka was still talking, but his voice sounded as if it were underwater.

  Felix’s fingers were gone. And they hurt.

  And they hurt.

  And they hurt.

  This was a nightmare. It had to be.

  Felix screamed loud enough to hear himself through his shock. The sound was all pain, filled with the agony of his not-there wounds. The door to the cabin swung open, and the man with the red cross appeared. Only now, in the full light of feverless waking, Felix could see he wasn’t a bear-man at all, just a medic wearing a fur cap, with flaps that went over his ears. The medic pushed Luka aside, twisting the top off a tiny, kanji-inscribed syrette. The air around Felix went cold as his shirt was shoved up. There was a pinch and a warmth.

  Felix had never taken morphine before, but he knew its effects instantly. Heat tugged at his belly, lifting his insides up. His sob settled into a shudder. The medic checked his bandages and gave him a pill, plus a swallow from a canteen to wash the bitterness down.

  “Where’s our friend?” he heard Luka asking the medic when the man moved to leave. “What have you done with Yael?”

  These questions made Felix want to scream again. The girl was no friend of his, no matter how much sorrow or sorry her stare held. Felix’s fingers were gone—scrap yard bound, beyond fixing. The Wolfes would suffer the same fate, if they hadn’t already. All of this—pain, loss, nothingness—was her fault. HERS!

  The medic had no answers. The cabin door opened and shut.

  Was the Arschloch frowning? His forehead held a crease Felix had never seen before—concern in the shape of a V. “Sorry about the fingers, Herr Wolfe. I saw that wound. If Yael hadn’t cleaned it out, if the Soviets hadn’t rolled in when they did, you wouldn’t have been long for this world. Stone-cold crow food. Consider yourself lucky.”

  Lucky? Felix wanted to hit this Schweinehund, but when he tried to make a fist, the pain struck anew. Too strong, too fresh for the new dose of morphine to reach. He gagged on it.

  “Easy there.” Luka’s brow wrinkles deepened. “You don’t need to go throwing any punches.”

  No, Felix wouldn’t be tossing any more right hooks. Nor would he be able to twist a Zündapp throttle or grip the many, many tools he used to fix things.

  “I can still feel them,” he whispered.

  It wasn’t a question, and Felix really didn’t expect an answer, but Luka offered one anyway. “Phantom pains. Your body thinks that whatever is gone is still there. Will for a while. My father used to get them. He lost his arm in the war, made him a hard Saukerl.…”

  Phantom pains. There was no healing in this hurt.

  The door opened again, flooding their cabin with the grumble of truck engines. A soldier motioned Luka to his feet, prodded the victor outside at riflepoint. Two other men came to either end of Felix’s stretcher (a real one, he realized now, no more bleeding parachute) and hoisted him high. All this as the morphine opened up a sky inside his body, lifting Felix up, up with every next second into a painless atmosphere. Heights he did not have to fear.

  CHAPTER 22

  It was the third time in a fortnight Luka had been captured by the enemy and held at gunpoint while being yelled at in a foreign language. This is a disturbing trend, he mused as a soldier goaded him forward, past the ashes of the Soviets’ campfires. Was it possible to be a magnet for mortal peril? He craned his neck as he marched through the village, looking for Yael. Her bright hair should’ve been easy to spot (assuming she hadn’t swapped faces on him), but there was no sign of the fräulein. Just soldiers everywhere, all aiming stares that were nothing short of murderous in his direction.

  He needed Yael. Not just for translating (it was much harder to smart-mouth your way out of trouble when no one around you spoke German) but also for staving off a sense of impending doom. After witnessing the bloody screamfest that was Felix’s amputation, Luka had stayed up the whole night, watching the mechanic twist in his drugged sleep and listening to the guards outside the door laugh in raucous Russian, hoping that Yael would come bursting in at any moment with some far-fetched escape plan.

  She hadn’t. And now Luka was being herded like a horse to a glue factory, left to wonder if his traveling companion was even alive. The mystery didn’t sit too well with him.

  He halted midstep, wincing as the bayonet gouged his back.

  “WHERE. IS. MY. FRIEND?” he asked in his loudest, slowest German.

  “Davay, idi!” the soldier yelled at him.

  This time Luka added hand gestures. “FRIEND. WHERE. GO?”

  “Durak!” The prod was harder this time. Luka was fairly certain it drew blood.

  The victor was about to use a different hand gesture—one so universally rude it needed no translation—when Felix’s stretcher passed. The mechanic was asleep again, tucked under a blanket and looking so pitifully pale that Luka didn’t really need the third prod to follow the stretcher-bearers into the empty transport. (Someone had to keep an eye on the boy and make sure the Soviets didn’t eat him. Or whatever it was commies did to their National Socialist foes.)

  Yael’s arrival caught him by the throat. She was alive, moving with an assuredness that made Luka wonder why he had ever worried she might not be. He couldn’t tear his stare away from her—ice-castle eyes, tangled-web hair, black leather everywhere—as she climbed into the truck. The sight of her was more than relief.

  “Did they hurt you?” he asked. It was hard to tell, with all the bruises Yael had already acquired. (Though these were starting to make their purple departure.)

  “No. You?”

  The small of Luka’s back stung, but it wasn’t worth mentioning. All he did was shoot a dirty look at the two infantry guards perched on the back of their transport. “Didn’t touch me. They even patched up Wonderboy Wolfe here.”

  “Did they save the fingers?”

  Luka shook his head. Yael leaned over the stretcher, staring at the mechanic with an intensity that made Luka’s chest twinge.

  Was he… jealous?

  It wasn’t until she pressed her hand to Felix’s forehead—when Luka saw the skin to skin, wished it was his—that he realized he was. It was the same nasty feeling that clawed the cockles of his heart outside the ballroom window, while he watched the fräulein dance with the Führer. Back when he thought she was Adele. Back when he thought he was in love with her…

  Pang, pang, dummkopf heart.

  “His fever’s down.” Yael pulled her hand away. Her eyes caught Luka’s, narrowed. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Luka shook his head. Get a verdammt grip, Löwe. “It’s nothing.”

  It’s nothing, it’s nothing.

  The transport’s suspension shuddered with the weight of a sixth body. A young wom
an (too young, Luka thought, for her salt-and-pepper braid) pushed past the guards’ half-alert Arisakas. Her German was as impeccable as her Soviet uniform. “I just spoke with the medic. We’re to keep him dosed with these every twelve hours. It’ll keep the pain bearable.” She held up a handful of morphine syrettes and placed them by the side of the stretcher. “Also, he found this in Herr Wolfe’s old uniform.”

  She handed Yael a scuffed silver watch. “I thought it would be better if you gave it to him.”

  From the stricken look on the fräulein’s face, Luka figured she felt the opposite. She pocketed it anyway. Her hand did not come out empty—a lump of wood lay in the center of Yael’s palm. It was about the size of a Stern-Halma piece, weathered, old, nothing special. But when Yael offered it to the strange woman, Luka sensed a shift between them. Gravitas gravity.

  “You kept it.” The woman’s sleeves were rolled up, and when she reached out, Luka couldn’t help but notice the number inked along her inner left arm. Her fingers hovered over the token without touching. Someone had carved up the wood, a crude job. There were two shallow stabs of holes in the top half. Eyes maybe? “All this time.” Yael nodded. “I didn’t keep the others,” the woman continued. “I couldn’t. After you escaped…”

  The woman’s voice trailed off. Luka was beginning to realize he did not belong in this scene. This woman knew Yael. Knew knew her. Their history felt so strong that it filled the entire transport, squeezing him to the fringes.

  When he cleared his throat, both women snapped out of their spell. Yael’s fist closed over the wooden piece. The Soviet woman looked at Luka—eyes calculating.

  “New friend?” he asked.

  “An old one, actually,” the stranger replied. Her tone lacked any overwhelming friendliness. “I’m Comrade Mnogolikiy.”

  “Come again?”

  “Mnogolikiy.”

  “Mgiol—” Luka gave up half a butchered syllable in. “Sorry. That word is not going to fit in my mouth. I’m going to have to call you something else. Tell you what, since you’re an old friend of Yael’s, I’ll let you have a nickname of your choosing.”

  The Soviet woman turned to Yael, speaking in rapid, rattling Russian. Yael nodded, responding in Russian just as fluid. Luka thought he heard his name tossed around somewhere in the mix.

  Yael wasn’t a Soviet, was she? Luka didn’t think so, but then again, how did she know Soviet-speak? And how was she old friends with an officer? There was so much about the fräulein Luka did not understand. So much he wanted to…

  The women’s untranslatable words eventually came to an end. The stranger turned to him and said, “Call me Miriam.”

  Miriam. The name was as rare as Yael’s, for one simple reason. (And, Luka suddenly realized, the same reason.) It was Jewish.

  This woman and Yael were Jewish.

  In his seventeen years, Luka had heard many things about the Jews. Untermensch, his racial sciences teacher had called them, citing facts about skull sizes and bloodlines. Enemy of the Aryan race had been his own father’s terminology of choice, words parroted from one of the Führer’s many Chancellery Chats. Thieves and devils were also thrown out during some of Kurt Löwe’s more rage-filled evenings. He would wave his good arm in the air, cursing them for the loss of the other while Adolf Hitler’s painted blue eyes watched above the mantel.

  Yael’s eyes were a sharper blue: seeing Luka and being seen. He caught her gaze, watching her in this new light. She was Jewish! The first Jewish person he’d ever met face-to-face, exchanged words with, knew…

  Was it really so surprising that Yael was nothing like the slurs Luka’s father/teacher/Führer spewed? That out of all the souls Luka had ever come across, hers was one of the brightest? It held the bravery of one hundred Iron Crosses, melted down and forged into something purer—a courage not corroded by cruelty.

  No, Luka decided. It took more than a few drops of blood—shed or inherited—to make someone a devil. He had to believe that, because if it wasn’t true, then what did that make him?

  His father’s son.

  Luka wanted to be better/stronger/more than that.

  “Miriam.” He turned back to the Soviet fräulein and offered his hand. “Call me Luka.”

  Miriam didn’t take it. Her stare flashed full of gold flecks, piercing. The sticky sense of history was still flooding the truck, leaving Luka no room to be.

  He dropped his arm.

  “Luka Löwe. Double victor. Face of the Third Reich.” His titles might as well have been crimes the way Miriam recited them. “I wasn’t aware you were a part of the resistance.”

  “Makes two of us,” Luka told her, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He could almost see Miriam’s verdict on his character plummeting: Arschloch. Guilty. No chance of parole.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’m…”

  Why was he here? His days had been so survival-oriented that Luka hadn’t really stopped to consider something as basic as this. He should’ve been back in Germania, giving a series of prewritten speeches in front of the Volkshalle about the virtues of the Aryan race: strength, endurance, honor, purity. Afterward he would have sat on the ghastly green love seat in his flat, watching reruns of his speech on the Reichssender, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes. Made of restless limbs and an antsy heart. His phone would’ve rung every few minutes with press and admirers and well-wishers, but Kurt Löwe would never have been on the other end, saying Well done, my son. Luka would’ve hated how those four unsaid words made him feel. He would have kept listening to himself on the television, realizing that no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, he was just as much of a lemming as his father and everyone else. Worse—Luka was the jester lemming, dancing to Goebbels’s propaganda tune.

  And after that?

  Luka saw his scripted life stretching out: Getting a job at the Chancellery, pushing papers, marrying a fräulein whose aim was to earn the Gold Cross of Honor of the German Mother in the form of eight screaming babies. Mouthing heil day after day, the double Iron Crosses growing heavier around his neck with each passing year. Kurt Löwe taking those four words to his verdammt grave because no amount of medals or scars his son collected would ever be enough, Luka’s strength fading inside an expanding waistline, not feeling right, never feeling right…

  Being here—sitting by Yael’s side in a truck in the thawing taiga—was technically a mistake. A wrong turn and then some. But it felt right in a way Luka couldn’t begin to describe. I’m here because it’s not boring wouldn’t cut it for the angry Soviet Jewish fräulein. I’m here because I’m here was too cheeky. I’m here because of Yael felt too… raw… to say out loud.

  He shrugged instead.

  “Along for the ride, then?” Not a real question. A scoff, made all the more cutting by Miriam’s gaze.

  “Miriam…” Yael’s words melted into Russian, and the two women began conversing in a level beyond Luka.

  Transport engines were being cranked to life all around them, rumbling through the forest. The truck bed shuddered under Luka’s boots as their driver shifted into first, began the long crawl forward. Collapsing cabins gave way to the sea of skeletons. The sight—all white and tangled and still—settled into Luka’s own bones as their truck shuddered past, pushed ahead through mud and trees. Miriam and Yael kept speaking low in Russian. Felix kept sleeping, his bandaged hand hanging along the side of the stretcher. Luka put his own hand against the dog tag under his shirt. Palm pressing to cloth, pressing to steel, pressing to proof of blood type A. The blood of Kurt Löwe. The blood of himself.

  Though Yael and Miriam’s words remained a mystery, Luka followed their tone well enough. Their conversation lasted several minutes—going from strained to sharp and angry to sullen—before Miriam finally sat down on the opposite side of the transport. The edge of her boots only a kick away from Luka’s own.

  “Get comfortable, Herr Löwe,” she told him. “We have a long drive ahead.”

/>   Herr Löwe was his father’s name, and there was no getting comfortable in this ZIS-5. (Bumpy road + shot suspension = good-bye, nicely aligned vertebrae!) But Luka kept both of these opinions to himself as he settled in.

  The drive was long. Trees passed into trees, the lines of their trunks going from brown to dim to invisible altogether once the sun set. The transports flicked on their headlamps (dimmed to prevent enemy detection) and kept driving. Felix slept like the dead, and Miriam eventually nodded off, too. Yael sat next to Luka. Something about the way she was holding her knees to her chest, staring out at the growing night, reminded him of the train to New Delhi—the first time they kissed. When all their truths and lies came to a standstill and Luka’s heart was clenched. His ventricles were clenching now, remembering it. The moonlight on the fräulein’s face. The warmth from her lips seeping all the way inside his heart, making it feel.

  Yael must have sensed him watching. She glanced over her shoulder in her fiercely beautiful, arctic wolf way. Eyebrow arched.

  Luka cleared his throat. “I don’t think your new-old friend likes me much.”

  “I didn’t either when we first met,” she said.

  When we first met. It took Luka a moment to remember this moment—back in the Olympiastadion. Yael had been wearing Adele’s face, speaking Adele’s words. Her hair had been translucent, skin glossy with rain. Luka’s own skin had burned with anger at the sight of Adele Wolfe in the flesh—his first since their bloody encounter in Osaka. “That’s different. I thought you were Adele. If I’d known you were you…”

  “It would have made things worse,” Yael said quietly into the passing night.

  “I’d like to think not,” Luka told her.

  Yael turned, facing him in full. The truck’s shadows wreathed her face, her silhouette edged by the sparse light of the trailing transport. Luka couldn’t quite decide if her brightness reminded him of an angel or a ghost. All he knew was that he wanted to close the gap between them, wanted to press his lips against hers again—an honest kiss, sans poison and sabotage. But honesty required knowledge, and Luka knew he was sitting on the wrong side of a wall made up of so many unknowns: tattoos and wooden tokens and a Soviet officer with golden eyes.