by neetha Napew
with a flux yet." Jager 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. Jager stomach growled the second he saw it.
He took two rings. Schultz took three. It was food fit for peasants, he knew; back in Munster, 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," Jager 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 Jager'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, Jager 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 horizon to show he wanted to find out where the aliens were.
The kolkhozniks didn't get it. Jager pantomimed short creatures, imitated the unmistakable screech of their airplanes as best he could. The kolkhoz chiefs eyes lit up. "Ah—yasheritsi" he said. The peasants clustered round him exclaimed. Jager memorized the word; he had the feeling he
would need it again.
The chief pointed south. Jager 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. Jager 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.
Jager 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... Jager 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. Jager 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 Jager 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, Jager 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, Jager 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 Jager 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," Jager 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, Jager 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. Jager 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 came. 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 inhumanseeming 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.
The younger one, the bigger one, had a peasant look to him despite his foreign cast of feature. She could easily imagine him on a stool milking a cow or, on his knees plucking weeds from a vegetable plot. The unabashed
way he leered at her was peasantlike, too.
The other German was harder to fathom. He looked tired and clever at the same time, with pinched features that did not match the lined and sun-darkened skin of an outdoorsman. Like the red-whiskered one, he wore a helmet and an infantryman's blouse over the black trousers of panzer troops. The blouse had a private's plain shoulder straps, but she did not think it was part of the gear he'd started out with. He was too old and too sharp to make a proper private.
In secondary school, a million years before, she'd had a little German. This past year, she'd done her best to forget it, and hoped her transcript had perished when Kiev was lost: knowing the enemy's language could easily make one an object of suspicion. If these soldiers had little or no Russian, though, it would prove useful, she dredged a phrase out of her memory: "H/fe heissen Sie?"
The Germans' worn, filthy faces lit up. Till now, they'd been nearly mute, tongue-tied among the Russians (which was also the root meaning of Nemtsi, the old Russian word for Germans— those who could make no intelligible sounds). The ginger-whiskered one grinned and said, "Ich heisse Feldwebel Georg Schultz, Fraulein."and rattled off his pay number too fast for her to follow.
The older one said, "Ich heisse Heinrich Jager Major" and also gave his number. She ignored it; it wasn't something she needed to know right now. The kolkhozniks murmured among themselves, either impressed she could speak to the Wehrmacht men in their own tongue or mistrustful of her for the same reason.
She wished she recalled more. She had to ask their unit, by clumsy circumlocution: "From which group of men do you come?"
The sergeant started to answer; the major (his name meant "hunter," Ludmila thought; he certainly had a hunter's eyes) cleared his throat, which sufficed to make the younger man shut up. Jagersaid, "Are we prisoners of war, Russian pilot? You may ask only certain things of prisoners of war." He spoke slowly, clearly, and simply; perhaps he recognized Ludmila's hesitancy with his language.
"A/yef,"she answered, and then, "Nein,"'m case he hadn't understood the Russian. He was nodding as she spoke, so evidently he had. She went on, "You are not prisoners of war. We fight the"— she perforce had to say yasheritsi. not knowing the German word for "Lizards"—"first. We fight Germans now only if Germans fight us. Not forget war against Germany, but put it to one side for now."
"Ah," the major said. "Yes, that is good. We fight the Lizards first also." (Eidechsen was
what the German said. Ludmila made a mental note of it.) Jager went on, "Since we have this common foe, I will tell you that we are from Sixteenth Panzer. I will also tell you that Schultz and I have together killed a Lizard panzer."
She stared at him. "This is true?" Radio Moscow made all sorts of claims of Lizard armor destroyed, but she had flown over too many battlefields to take them seriously any more, she'd seen what was left of German panzer units that tried to take on the Lizards, too: not much. Were these tankmen lying to impress her with how masterful the Germans remained?
No, she decided after a moment of watching and listening to them. They described the action in too much vivid detail for her to doubt them: if they hadn't been through what they were talking about, they belonged on the stage, not in the middle of a collective farm.
Most convincing of all was Jager's mournful summary at the end: "We hurt them, but they wrecked us. All my company's tanks are gone."
"What are they saying, Comrade Pilot?" Pavlyuchenko demanded.
>
She quickly translated. The kolkhozniks gaped at the Germans as if they were indeed the superior beings they claimed to be. Their wide eyes made Ludmila want to kick them. Russians always looked on Germans with a peculiar mixture of envy and fear. Ever since the days of the Vikings, the Russian people had learned from more sophisticated Germanic folk to the west. And ever since the days of the Vikings, the Germanic peoples had looked to seize what they could from their Slavic neighbors. Teutonic Knights, Swedes, Prussians, Germans—the labels changed, but the Germanic push to the east seemed to go on forever. Though latest and worst, Hitler
was but one of many.
Still, these particular Germans could be useful. They hadn't beaten the Lizards, far from it, but they'd evidently made them sit up and take notice. Soviet authorities needed to learn what they knew. Ludmila returned to their language: "I will take you with me when I fly back to my base, and send you on from there. I promise nothing bad will happen to you."