What would happen if, say, Detroit got it, and Chicago, and Boston, and Miami? Would that be enough of a catastrophe to make the citizens storm the White House and the Capitol with torches and pitchforks and—very likely—nooses? If it wasn’t, what would be?
And wouldn’t that be the kind of tide a power-hungry, opportunistic bastard like Joe McCarthy could ride to power? Tail Gunner Joe was bound to hope it was. Not quite aware he was thinking out loud, Truman said, “That man ought to have himself an accident.”
“Those are Stalin’s rules, sir, and Hitler’s, not ours,” Marshall said.
The President sighed. “Uh-huh. I know. But if Hitler’d had an accident like that in, oh, 1928, the world’d be better off today.”
“Maybe. Or maybe the Germans would have wound up with a dictator who knew what he was doing and didn’t make the dumb mistakes Adolf did,” Marshall replied. “It’s all a crapshoot, and you don’t know what the dice will do till you roll ’em.”
“There’s a cheerful thought!” Truman exclaimed. He’d had too many cheerful thoughts like that lately.
—
Vasili Yasevich walked through the pines toward the Amur. He hadn’t seen many people lately. He didn’t much want to see people right now. He was ragged and dirty and tired and hungry, but he preferred all of those to some friendly fool who’d start asking questions.
Snow crunched beneath his valenki. May or not, it lingered long here under the trees. Back in the day, people had said that tigers lived in these woods. His father had sold what he claimed to be tiger liver and gall bladder—and other, more intimate, parts—to Chinese customers. He’d charged through the nose for them, too, even though he didn’t think they did anything. He knew the Chinese thought they did something, and that was what counted.
A tiger would get it over with quicker than either the Chinese police or the MGB. A tiger would also get it over with quicker than getting caught on the fringes of an atomic blast. He’d been far enough from Harbin not to get hurt when that A-bomb went off. He was traveling through the chilly night a few days before when a flash of light far, far away said another town got fed to that fire. He didn’t know for sure which one, but Khabarovsk seemed the best guess.
Now people there were melted and burned and blinded and going through the hell of radiation sickness. He’d already seen that once. Once was three times too many for a single lifetime.
But the Chinese character that meant crisis combined the ones for danger and opportunity. If he made it to the Soviet side of the Amur, he could claim he came from the outskirts of Khabarovsk and had got away with just the clothes on his back. Most of the time, the MGB would automatically snatch up anybody who couldn’t show proper papers. Even the Chekists, though, had to realize plenty of refugees from cities that got A-bombed wouldn’t have made a point of taking their documents with them.
Danger, yes. From everything his father and mother had said, danger was constant company in the USSR. But also opportunity. He had a chance to fit himself into Soviet life he never would have got if not for the American bombers.
One thing at a time. First he had to reach the far side of the Amur. That might not be so easy. He could already hear it gurgling past in front of him, so he was getting close. He knew it was broad and swift and cold. Trying to swim it was probably asking to freeze or to get swept downstream and drowned.
Half an hour later, he reached the river. He’d come this far. The Chinese hadn’t caught him. That struck him as a miracle bigger than any the priests in the Orthodox church in Harbin blathered about when he was a kid. The pines on the far side of the river belonged to another country, one where his looks didn’t brand him a foreign devil. All he had to do was cross.
The Amur held a few low, muddy islands. They were boat-shaped, with the long stretch paralleling the current. Vasili got the idea that the ones he saw might not be there five years from now, but that others could rise to take their places.
He wondered if he could make a raft and paddle or pole out to one of them. It would be a useful way station…if he could get to it. What he had for chopping down trees, unfortunately, were his straight razor and the little knife in the top of his right felt boot.
He bent down and scooped up a handful of water to drink. The river was bitterly cold, even worse than he’d guessed. No, he didn’t want to swim in it. But how could he cross if he didn’t? He wasn’t Jesus, to walk across on top of the water in one of those priestly miracles.
That water was glassy clear. Fish swam in it—he could see them. His stomach growled. He’d always thought the Japanese were disgusting for eating raw fish. If he could somehow pull one of these out of the water, he didn’t think he’d bother cleaning it before he gulped it. Scales? Fins? Bones? Guts? Down the hatch!
Then he saw the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He was sure of it. When you wanted—when you had—to cross a river, what could be more gorgeous than a man with a fishing pole sitting in a rowboat?
Was the man Russian or Chinese? Vasili didn’t know or care. He still had one trade dollar and a little of the opium he’d left Harbin with. What food he’d eaten on the way north, he’d bought with the other silver coin and the rest of the drug. When they already suspected you of peddling it, you stopped caring about what they’d do if they caught you.
Vasili cupped his hands in front of his mouth and yelled “Hey!” as loud as he could. The fellow in the boat kept right on fishing. “Hey!” Vasili yelled again, even louder this time—loud enough so something in his throat started to hurt. He waved his arms. He jumped up and down.
After what seemed forever and a day, the fisherman noticed he was there. The man waved back to him, as if to a friend.
“Hey!” Vasili screamed one more time. He almost added Yob tvoyu mat’, idiot! Almost but not quite: a Russian would understand the obscenity, and even a Chinese on the border might. He did wave again, and beckon, and yell, “Come here!”
Slowly, languidly, the fisherman started rowing toward him. Just the way he did it made Vasili think he had to be a Russian. Chinese didn’t act as if they had all the time in the world. They knew too well they didn’t.
And, sure enough, when the man got close enough to hail Vasili without rupturing his lungs, he called, “Zdrast’ye!” By then, Vasili had seen that he wore a shaggy russet beard. It might help keep him warm through the winters in these parts. Vasili’s whiskers were getting longer and thicker by the day, too.
“How are you?” Vasili answered, also in Russian. “How’s the fishing?”
“Not too bad, not too bad,” the fellow said. He picked up a bottle from the bottom of the boat and raised it to his mouth. His throat worked. Russians ran on vodka the way tanks ran on diesel fuel. “Ah! That’s the straight goods!”
“How about you take me over to the other side?” Vasili said.
“What?” The man stared at him. “You want to go over there?” He jerked a thumb back at the Soviet side of the river.
“Da. That’s right,” Vasili said.
A look of sozzled cunning spread across the fisherman’s face. “How come? What did you do on your side?”
“I got a big shot sore at me. What else do you need to do?”
“Not fucking much. So it’s the same down there as it is on our side, huh?”
“It’s got to be the same all over the world,” Vasili said sourly. “I can give you some silver. I can give you a little opium, too, if you let me have a couple of fish.”
“Opium? I’d rather drink vodka.”
Fool, Vasili thought. Aloud, he said, “I bet you can find somebody who wants it.”
“Maybe.” That shrewd look came back. “How do I know you ain’t trying to get me into trouble?”
“How do I know you aren’t a Chekist?” Vasili returned.
The fisherman guffawed. “Think I’d be out here dicking around if I belonged to the MGB? Those cunts make you do stuff. You can’t just take off and go fishing every time you get a hard-on f
or it.”
From everything Vasili’d heard, that was true. He said, “I’ll give you a trade dollar for the trip, along with the opium for the fish.”
“A dollar? From America? They’d slice my balls off if I tried to do anything with it.” Now the Russian—the Soviet Russian—looked alarmed.
As patiently as he could, Vasili said, “They call them Mex dollars in China. It’s still silver. It’s still heavy. If you can’t pass it, you can melt it down.” He sounded as persuasive as he knew how, as if he were trying to get a girl into bed with him. “Come on, pal. Take me across and then forget you ever saw me.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
“Of course it’s like that. What, you think I came to China for my fucking vacation? Come on, take me over. It’ll be worthwhile for you, as long as you keep your yap shut.”
If the fisherman decided it was too risky, all Vasili could do was wait till another boat came along. If another boat ever came along. He made himself remember that, and didn’t cuss as hard as he might have. He tried to look friendly and harmless.
He must have managed, because the Russian rowed over. The boat’s nose or prow or whatever you called it scraped on Chinese mud. “Khorosho. Hop in.”
In Vasili hopped. He showed the fisherman the trade dollar and the opium. He also flipped open his straight razor. “I’ll pay you when we get across.”
Not much later, the boat grated on Soviet soil. It sounded the same as the Chinese mud had. Vasili left the coin and the glass jar. He took three trout.
“Thanks,” he said, and got out. The fisherman, whose name he’d never learned, went back into the Amur as fast as he could.
I’ve come home, Vasili thought. Then he found out what raw fish tasted like.
—
Isztvan Szolovits crouched in a foxhole that wasn’t deep enough. Up ahead, a machine gun threw death in his direction. Along with the stream of reports from the gun, every so often a bullet would crack past not nearly far enough over his head. The team running that gun knew what they were doing with it. They traversed it so the rounds streamed back and forth. Anyone who got up and tried to advance on it asked to catch one with his teeth, or maybe with his navel. The gunners were shooting low.
Isztvan wasn’t sure whether the machine gun was in Bochum or Essen. For that matter, he wasn’t sure whether he was in Bochum or Essen. The two German towns west of Dortmund blended seamlessly, one into the other. The only difference between them Isztvan could see was that mail to them didn’t go through the same post office.
He still had no idea why nobody’d killed him. He had to be luckier than he’d ever imagined. The Russians were determined to get as much use as they could from the Hungarian troops they’d brought forward. They thought using soldiers meant using them up, too. As far as the Russians were concerned, men were as disposable as bullets or boots.
That applied to their own troops. It applied even more to soldiers from Hungary or Poland or Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria or Romania. If getting killed advanced the sacred cause of socialism, or if the Russian marshals even suspected it might, they spent troops like kopeks.
Foomp! Foomp! Those were mortars going off. With the evil little beasts, the Hungarians didn’t even have to stick their noses out of their holes to shoot back at the machine gun. Isztvan approved of shooting back without running the risk of getting hurt.
The machine gun fell silent. Isztvan wondered whether the mortar had killed the men who served it or they were bluffing and waiting to shoot down anybody naive enough to try to advance. Such questions were important. If you were a Hungarian soldier fighting in the Ruhr, they were life-and-death important.
In the lull, somebody from the other side shouted in Magyar: “What are you fools doing fighting for Stalin? Come over to the Americans! You’ll be free, and no one will try to kill you or make you do anything you don’t want to do!”
Hearing the man reminded Isztvan how many Magyars had left their own country for the United States in the days before the First World War. It reminded him all kinds of ways, in fact. The American soldier who spoke the language had plainly learned from his folks as a child, not in school. He had a peasant accent from the back of beyond, and an old-fashioned peasant accent at that. Magyar in Hungary had moved on, while his was stuck in the past like a fly in amber.
None of which had anything to do with the price of beer. He might talk like a clodhopper from 1895, but his message was modern as tomorrow. He wasn’t saying anything Isztvan hadn’t asked himself a hundred times. Isztvan didn’t care a filler about the solidarity of workers and peasants all over the world. He was here because Stalin and Stalin’s followers, both Russian and Hungarian, would have killed him or tortured him or jailed him had he tried to refuse. That was the long and short of it.
“Kibaszott szarházi!” Those were Sergeant Gergely’s dulcet tones. How did he know that the Magyar-speaking American was a fucking shithouse clown? Odds were he didn’t, but that didn’t stop him.
“God fuck your stinking, wrinkled whore of a mother!” the guy on the other side yelled back. Isztvan giggled. Maybe he hadn’t learned all his Magyar from his mommy and daddy.
“Yell all you want, dog’s dick,” Gergely said. “We didn’t drop any A-bombs on your country.”
“No, Stalin did. You just suck him off,” the Hungarian-American replied.
Sergeant Gergely spoke to his own men: “You see how we’re all friends together, right?”
Some of the Magyars answered to show him they agreed. Whether in fact they did or not was anybody’s guess. Gergely had to know that. This was his second war fighting for a dubious cause. He had a different dubious cause now from the one he’d aided during World War II, but, as then, Hungary was doing what a great power required, not what it wanted to do itself.
Isztvan Szolovits kept his mouth shut. He didn’t think protestations of loyalty would give the sergeant any more confidence in him. For that matter, he had no confidence in himself. If he found a chance to surrender to the Americans without getting killed, he figured he would jump at it. The Magyar-speaking Yank had that much right.
In the meantime, though, he needed to keep fighting. Chances to surrender didn’t come along every day. The Americans would cheerfully kill him most of the time. The best way to stay alive and wait for the moment he might not find involved shooting back at them when they fired at him.
Which they did, with rifles, machine guns, and artillery. Under cover of all that flying metal, some of them started moving forward through the wreckage of whichever German city this turned out to be. They aimed to flank out the Hungarians and drive them back.
Isztvan was ready to retreat, if he could come out of his hole without getting killed. But half a dozen Soviet T-54s rumbled forward like dinosaurs squashing little mammals under their feet in some prehistoric swamp. Unlike those ancient little mammals, some of the Americans carried bazookas. But when two rockets in a row glanced off the tanks’ turtle turrets without penetrating, the Yanks gave it up as a bad job and fell back to their old line.
An American who’d stopped a machine-gun bullet from one of the tanks with his face lay only fifty meters or so from Isztvan’s hole. Greed overcame caution. He crawled to the dead Yank, took his food and cigarettes and first-aid kit, and slithered back to cover.
After dark fell, he gave Sergeant Gergely two of the three packs he’d looted. “Thanks, kid, but those Russian tankers deserve these more than I do,” the veteran said.
“Could be, but I know you and I don’t know them,” Isztvan said. “Boy, that American who spoke Magyar sure talked funny, didn’t he?”
“Oh, just a little,” Gergely answered. “Like he had cowshit on his boots and rode a donkey to church. I’ll tell you something else, though—you think the Yanks won’t fuck you over same as the krauts and the Ivans, you’re nuts. They’re big. You ain’t. That’s all it takes.”
“Could be,” Szolovits said again.
Gergely couldn’t ha
ve seen the expression on his face. It was too dark. He chuckled anyhow, unpleasantly. “Don’t do anything stupid—that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” he said. Isztvan wished it weren’t such good advice.
THE DOCTOR WHO EXAMINED Konstantin Morozov’s burned legs looked Jewish as Jewish could be: sallow skin, dark eyes, hooked nose. But she also filled out her white coat very nicely. “Sergeant, you look like you’re fit to go back on duty,” she said. “Do you feel fit?”
His flesh remained tender—or, if you wanted to tell the whole story, sore. He nodded anyway. “Yes, Comrade Doctor,” he answered. He might have said no to a sawbones who shaved and won another day or two on this cot. Telling a woman no was harder. It felt like admitting he had a needle dick.
“All right.” She wrote something on the paper in the clipboard she carried. “The rodina needs every man who can fight.” He was going to say I serve the Soviet Union!, but she’d already moved on to the next iron cot.
They handed him a fresh set of tankman’s coveralls and a new leather helmet with built-in earphones. They gave him just enough time to put his sergeant’s shoulder boards on the coveralls. They they sent him over to the replacements’ assignment depot.
“What was your last duty before you were wounded?” asked the military clerk in charge of the depot. He wore a patch over his right eye, so chances were he’d paid his dues during the Great Patriotic War. He could still do a job like this, and save a whole man for combat.
“Tank commander,” Morozov replied proudly.
“Ochen khorosho,” the mutilated man said. “Have a seat on one of the benches. I don’t think you’ll need to wait long.”
Konstantin sat. The bench was too low. The building had been a school till war washed over it. Now half the roof had burned away. On one wall was a poster of a bulldozer clearing away rubble from the last war. Konstantin couldn’t read the words. It wasn’t his language, or even his alphabet. If he’d had to guess, though, he would have figured it said something like We’re getting back on our feet.
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