“Yeah, in spite of everything.” The noncom didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “You’ve got your head on straight, and that counts for more than whether your cock’s clipped.”
“Gosh, Sergeant, you say the sweetest things,” Isztvan said.
This time, Gergely laughed out loud, which didn’t happen every day. “Menj a halál faszára,” he said. Szolovits hadn’t dreamt anyone could tell him to go sit on death’s dick and sound affectionate doing it, but Sergeant Gergely managed.
“What happens if you promote me and I order somebody to do something and he tells me that?” Szolovits asked. “Somebody like, oh, Andras?”
“Well, there’s two things you can do. You can tell me, and I’ll take care of it. Or you can whale the shit out of the pussy yourself and go on about your business. The less a sergeant hears about the little stuff, the happier he is.”
Isztvan wasn’t sure he could whale the shit out of Andras Orban. He was ready to try, though; a Jew who wasn’t ready to fight in post-Fascist Hungary would be a doormat all his life. You did what you had to do, not what you wanted to do.
Gergely’s other comment was also interesting. Szolovits asked, “Is the captain happy when he doesn’t hear much from you?”
“Sure he is,” Gergely answered. “He doesn’t hear about picky crap because I take care of it. The colonel doesn’t want to hear about garbage the captain ought to handle, either. Hell, you think Stalin wants to listen to arguments about which army goes into which front? That’s why he’s got generals, for Christ’s sake.”
“I…hadn’t thought much about what Stalin wants,” Szolovits said. If he had thought about it, it was to assume that whatever Stalin wanted, he got.
“In that case, you’re even. Stalin hasn’t thought about what you want, either.” Gergely chuckled once more. So did Isztvan, dutifully. A superior’s jokes were always funny.
—
When you looked at a kolkhoz, you saw the residence halls and the barns and the other buildings at the center. Spreading out from them, you saw fields of grain and meadows where the collective farm’s cattle and sheep grazed. As Ihor Shevchenko knew, you also saw that the buildings were shabby and faded and that no one worked like a Stakhanovite to bring in extra cubic meters of barley or to get the cows to give extra liters of milk.
What was the point? If you did work like a Stakhanovite, the state would take the crop and whatever it needed from the livestock. You wouldn’t get anything extra for doing more. You wouldn’t get in trouble for doing less, not unless you did so very little that the commissars couldn’t even pretend you weren’t sitting there playing with your dick. So people did as little as they could to get by, or maybe a touch less than that.
Almost everywhere on the kolkhoz, that was so. It was so almost everywhere on every kolkhoz anywhere in the Soviet Union, and on the collective farms that had sprouted in Stalin’s Eastern European satellites after the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Ihor didn’t know whether the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea boasted kolkhozes of their own. If they did, it was bound to be true almost everywhere on those collective farms as well.
Almost. Near the buildings at any kolkhoz, women tended tiny private plots. No careless turning of the soil there. No slipshod weeding. What they grew on those little plots, they could keep. They could eat it themselves or take it to unofficial markets and sell it or trade it for things they needed but wouldn’t get through regular channels for years, if ever.
As women raised carrots or cucumbers or tomatoes or radishes or onions or lettuces on their plots, the men on collective farms tended to a pig or two or some chickens or ducks. Those animals, those birds, had care lavished on them that the beasts the kolkhoz as a whole was responsible for never saw. When you slaughtered your own pig, you made damn sure it had a nice layer of tasty fat under its hide. A scrawny, razor-backed collective-farm pig? Who wanted a beast like that?
When you took care of your own pig, it got as friendly as a dog. You got to like it. Or, at least, Ihor got to like the shoats he raised. But, while he got to like them as animals, he knew he would like them even better as meat. So he patted this one’s head and scratched its ears, but he had a knife in his other hand even so.
“Sorry, Nestor,” he said. Nestor snuffled. He was good-natured even for a pampered private pig. That wouldn’t do him any good, but he didn’t know it. Plenty of good-natured people had tried to stay friendly when the Chekists grabbed them in the great purges before the Hitlerite war. They turned into sausages, too. Ihor turned to Anya. “Bucket ready?”
“Right here.” She tapped the galvanized pail with the side of her foot.
“Dobre,” Ihor said. “Put it in place.” Steering it like a footballer, she slid it under Nestor’s neck. Ihor patted the pig one more time. Then he cut its throat.
He hung on while Nestor thrashed and made horrified drowning noises. Red and hot and iron-smelling, blood poured into the bucket. After half a minute or so, the pig went limp. Ihor thought about blood pudding and blood sausages and ham and ribs and chops and potatoes fried in lard.
He waited till he was sure Nestor was gone before gutting the pig. He didn’t want it to suffer any more than it had to. He’d seen too many suffering men during the war to care to inflict needless pain. Some people didn’t care. They were the ones who hit their dogs and kicked their cats after they fought with their wives. It’s only a dumb animal, they would say. Ihor thought they were the dumb animals.
Guts meant sausage casings and chitterlings. Liver, kidneys…The less you wasted, the more you had.
Another kolkhoznik ambled by as Ihor went on with the butchering. “You’re my good, true friend, aren’t you, Ihor?” he called.
“Mykola, you look like a hound sitting in front of a butcher’s window with its tongue hanging out,” Ihor said.
“The hound hopes he gets some scraps. So do I.” Mykola threw back his head and howled.
“We’ll see what we can work out,” Ihor said. Mykola wasn’t anywhere close to the best pigkeeper or chicken farmer on the collective farm. But his clever hands could fix anything that broke. When you had something somebody wanted and he could do things for you, you’d cook up some kind of deal.
Meat to eat fresh, meat to salt, meat to smoke, meat to pickle, fat to render…Nestor would keep Ihor’s belly full, and Anya’s, for quite a while. Even so, they wouldn’t be able to eat all of him by themselves. Some would get traded to Mykola and other people like him.
And Ihor took a slab of ribs to Petro Hapochka. In the days of the Tsars, Petro would have been a village headman. Most of the Ukrainians who had been village headmen then died in Stalin’s famine. Hapochka’s title was kolkhoz chairman. He had to deal with more senior Soviet functionaries at the oblast level. But on the collective farm he did what a village headman would have done in his village in the old days. He made sure the work that had to be done got done. He kept quarrels among the kolkhozniks from getting out of hand. He tried to stop drunks from gumming up the works.
He also got the rewards a village headman would have in the old days. If you didn’t want your life to be one nuisance after another, you kept him sweet. No law said you had to. Laws, in fact, said you had to do no such thing. The USSR’s constitution made it look like the freest country in the world. You couldn’t count on what laws said.
“Bozhemoi, Ihor, what have you got there?” he said when Ihor came up to him. Petro was in his late forties. He walked with a limp worse than Ihor’s, and well he might have: he’d lost his left foot in a German minefield in the fighting near Voronezh in 1943.
“I finally went and slaughtered Nestor,” Ihor answered. “I figured you might find somebody on the kolkhoz who could use these.”
“I might. Tak, I just might.” That Hapochka used Ukrainian showed he was pleased; Russian was the tongue of official formality. Had Ihor come out and said he was giving the chairman the ribs, that would have been bad
form. Had Petro given any hint he would keep them for himself, that also would have been bad manners. They understood each other, and the game, perfectly well.
“Comrade Chairman…?” Ihor switched gears.
“What is it?” Hapochka’s tone was expansive, not suspicious. Those ribs paid for a question or two.
“Do the people who’re supposed to know such things know when they’ll put Kiev back together again?”
“Nobody has any idea, Ihor. Not a hint. Some of the people who would plan things like that were in Kiev when the bomb hit. They aren’t there any more.” A village headman would have crossed himself. Petro didn’t, but looked as if he wanted to. He went on, “And the people who would have told the people in Kiev what to do were in Moscow, and Moscow took a worse pasting than Kiev.”
“That’s what I’ve heard, too.” Ihor had mixed feelings about Moscow, as which Ukrainian did not? Moscow forced them to be part of a country where they weren’t quite first-class citizens. Then again, Moscow had saved them from being part of a country where they’d get worked like draft animals and knocked over the head if they faltered. Next to Hitler, Stalin seemed a bargain. Before the Great Patriotic War, who could have imagined that?
“We just have to go on about our business till things straighten out,” Petro said. “Sooner or later, they will. They’re bound to.”
“Sure, Comrade Chairman.” Ihor nodded. He wondered whether either of them believed it.
—
Herschel Weissman puffed on his Havana and said, “We have an order for a refrigerator down in Torrance.”
“We do?” Aaron Finch said, in place of telling his boss You’re kidding me, right? If you drew a line between the Blue Front warehouse and the South Bay suburb of Torrance, downtown Los Angeles would be somewhere close to the middle. Or rather, it would have been till the Russian A-bomb forcibly removed it from the map.
“We do,” Weissman said. “I want you and Jim to take the truck down there. You do the driving. It’s liable to be too complicated for him.”
“How did we get the order, anyway?” Aaron asked. Telephone connections between that part of the L.A. area and this one weren’t just spotty. For the most part, they didn’t exist.
“The lady wrote me a letter,” Weissman answered. “A very nice letter. It got from there to here. Since it did, I expect you can get from here to there.”
“A letter doesn’t have to worry about radiation sickness.”
“Maybe not, but the people who carry it do. It’s okay if you go around downtown, Aaron.”
“Thanks a bunch!” Aaron said. Weissman was feeling generous, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just okay for him to skirt downtown. It was mandatory. Inside a circle more than a mile wide, there not only weren’t any roads, there wasn’t much of anything. Inside a considerably wider circle, the road hadn’t been cleared of all the buildings and poles and walls and fences the explosion had littered them with. People had been evacuated from a wider circle yet, a circle without electricity or running water. They filled three or four town-sized refugee camps.
You could say that area centered on downtown was a circle the twentieth century didn’t touch. But the twentieth century had touched it pretty goddamn hard if you looked at things another way.
Jim Summers grumbled, “I oughta wear my lead-lined skivvies for a trip like this.”
“If you’ve got ’em, wear ’em,” Aaron said. As far as he knew—it wasn’t as if he’d gone looking—no one had been selling lead-lined clothes before the war started. You could sure buy them now. How much good they did was a hotly, so to speak, argued question.
“I don’t,” Jim said. “So the closer we go to downtown, the better the chance we got of fryin’ our nuts. Or am I missin’ somethin’?”
“Sounds about right,” Aaron said.
“What we oughta do, then, is go way the hell over to Pacific Coast Highway and head down it so we keep the hell away from them atoms,” Summers said.
“That’s wasting an awful lot of time and gasoline,” Aaron said dubiously.
“Gas is cheap.”
“Not since the bombs hit. It’s still over fifty cents a gallon. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Jim Summers rolled his eyes. “Anybody’d reckon you was the Hebe, not old man Weissman.” He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and took two singles out of it. “This oughta cover the difference.”
He was right; two bucks would more than take care of the gas for the extra distance. All the same, Aaron set his chin and said, “Can you pull two or three hours out of your back pocket the same way? We can get over the hill through Sepulveda, maybe even through Laurel Canyon.”
“I know what’s eatin’ you.” Summers wasn’t smart, or anywhere close to it. He could be shrewd, though. “You want to see what the bomb wreckage looks like, from as close as you can git. I got news for you, pal—curiosity killed the cat.”
“Satisfaction brought it back,” Aaron retorted. He didn’t like being so easy to see through.
“Not if it was glowin’ in the dark to begin with.”
“Mr. Weissman said I should do the driving for this run.” Aaron didn’t tell Jim that was because the boss didn’t trust Summers not to make a hash of it.
“Says you! We’ll see about that.” Jim stumped off to have it out with the boss. Aaron could have told him that wasn’t such a hot idea, but he didn’t think Jim would have listened to him. As Aaron expected, Jim came back in short order, more crestfallen than he’d set out. Aaron had pulled punches; Herschel Weissman wasn’t the kind of man who’d see any reason to bother. After muttering to himself for a few seconds, Jim said, “Awright, smart guy. We’ll do it your way. But if your next kid has green hair and eyes on stalks, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Aaron didn’t worry about that. From what the doctors said, Ruth was lucky to have had Leon. She’d lost a girl before she managed to do it. They said she’d have to be meshiggeh to try again. Aaron didn’t love rubbers, but he didn’t want to endanger his wife. Rubbers it was, unless they did something that didn’t risk getting her pregnant.
As for the green hair and the eyes on stalks, Aaron couldn’t imagine Jim reading a science-fiction pulp with a story about mutants. That had to come straight from the comic books.
Aaron did decide to go as far west as Sepulveda before turning south. Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon might still let out into bomb-damaged parts of town. Before the bomb fell, it would have been an easy trip. The Pasadena Freeway—people also called it the Arroyo Seco, the Dry Wash—had been there for a while; they were calling its southern extension the Harbor Freeway even if it hadn’t come close to the harbor yet. After it ended, Vermont or Western would have finished the route. Now they were finished. The newer Hollywood Freeway met the Pasadena downtown. That would have worked, too. No more.
The Blue Front truck chugged up to the top of Sepulveda Pass, then down the other side. As the Santa Monica Mountains shrank to foothills and then flatland, Aaron craned his neck so he could look east. So did Jim, for all his complaining.
“Oh, Lord,” he said softly. Aaron nodded. They couldn’t see well, because closer buildings that still stood kept getting in the way, but the background to those buildings that should have been there…wasn’t. It had been swept away, as if by the fist of an angry child—an angry child who happened to be several miles tall.
At Sunset, Aaron resisted temptation. He got his reward, if that was what it was, by driving past an enormous refugee encampment. National Guardsmen patrolled a barbed-wire perimeter. People dejectedly mooched about from one tent to another. The wind came out of the west, from the direction of the camp. Despite a cigarette in his mouth, Aaron made a face.
“Pew!” Jim Summers said. “Buncha stinking skunks. Don’t they ever take a bath?”
“I wonder how often they get the chance,” Aaron said.
“If they ever get it, they don’t use it,” Jim said.
At Wilshire, Aaron yielded
, turning left. Jim called him some amazing things when he did. “I love you, too,” he answered, deadpan. That produced more creativity from Summers. Aaron kept heading east, toward the blast zone, anyhow.
Wilshire stayed open for some distance. Even when buildings had fallen down, the ruins were bulldozed off the street. Finally, at Crenshaw, sawhorses kept him from going any farther. A sign declared that it was A FEDERAL RECLAMATION PROJECT. Under the stenciled words, hand-painted letters added WE SHOOT LOOTERS! NO QUESTIONS ASKED FIRST! To drive home that point, more National Guardsmen and some cops prowled the area. All of them, men in blue included, carried rifles with fixed bayonets. Aaron turned right and headed south.
Bulldozer crews kept shoving rubble out of the way. Like most of the soldiers and policemen, the drivers and a lot of other workers wore masks like the ones doctors used in operating rooms. Seeing that, Aaron thoughtfully rolled up his window. It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.
He rolled it down again when they got farther south. He could look east and see what was left of the Coliseum. It had hosted the 1932 Olympics; the Trojans and Bruins and Rams played there. Or they had. The great stone-and-concrete bowl looked more battered than pictures he’d seen of the ancient Colosseum in Rome.
“What a mess!” Jim said. “What a fuckin’ mess!”
Aaron nodded. That he could see what remained of the Coliseum said that everything in the two or three miles between him and it had been knocked flat. Farther north, City Hall, which had been by far the tallest building in an earthquake-wary town, was only a melted stump. If the earthquakes don’t get you, then the atoms will, he thought. Los Angeles would be a long time getting back on its feet, if it ever did.
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