Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  She got Linda to the kindergarten on time. Then, without anybody to look after, she had no idea what to do with herself. Those bad thoughts that watching Linda kept her too busy to notice clamored for attention now. She mooched along with her head down, hardly caring where she was going. If not for her little girl, her gloom might have taken an even darker, more self-destructive turn. What really scared her was that it might anyhow.

  “Good morning!”

  That was so plainly aimed at her, she had to look up. From the guttural r, she already knew it was Fayvl Tabakman. “Hello,” she said to the cobbler.

  He studied her with narrowed, worried eyes. “How you are doing?” he asked. His English was quite good, especially since he’d had only a few years speaking it, but perfect it wasn’t.

  Marian started to say Fine, the way you did when anybody asked how you were. Only the note of genuine concern she heard in his voice made her answer honestly instead: “Not so hot, Mr. Tabakman. Not so hot.”

  He nodded. “I believe you. It is still very new for you, too new to take it all in. You have no notion how such a thing could have happened to you.”

  What do you know about it? The angry thought fell to pieces as soon as it formed. He knew all about it. He’d known for years. His loved ones hadn’t died in combat, the way Bill had. They’d been murdered, for no reason at all that anyone sane could find.

  “How…How did you get through it without going crazy?” she asked.

  “Being at Auschwitz, that was almost a help,” the Jew answered. “I had so much work to do, and I was so busy trying to stay alive my own self, when did I have time to grieve? And I was starving. Everything shuts down then—the feelings, too. So when I was freed and I could start thinking about what happened, time had gone by. Time is a blessing. Every day further away is a blessing.”

  “I—suppose so.” It wasn’t so much that Marian didn’t believe as that she hadn’t had enough days go by yet.

  “It’s true.” He nodded again, and touched the brim of his cloth cap. “Well, I don’t trouble you no more.”

  “You’re not troubling me,” she said quickly. “You know what I’m going through. You know better than I do—you’ve been through it yourself already.”

  “Today, tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, one at a time,” Tabakman said. “It’s all you can do. It’s all anybody can do. You want somebody to talk to, I can maybe listen.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Not a whole bunch of things to do in this place, you know?”

  I’m more interesting than twiddling his thumbs, Marian thought. But she couldn’t stay miffed. She didn’t try very hard. Her wound was still fresh and raw. His might have scarred over, but, say what he would, how could it not still fester underneath?

  Pain drew pain. Shared pain drew understanding. Or it might, anyhow. She could hope. A little while earlier, she hadn’t been able to imagine even so much. You took what you could get, if you could get anything at all.

  —

  The mirror in the bathroom of the ground-floor flat Gustav Hozzel was defending hadn’t broken. He couldn’t guess why not; almost everything else in the place had. But he got his first good look at himself for a couple of weeks.

  He looked like an Ami, but that was the uniform’s fault. It was filthy and badly worn. So was he. Aside from looking like an American, he looked like hell. His whiskers were at that haven’t-shaved-in-five-days stumblebum stage. More of the ones on his chin were coming in white.

  His eyes…It wasn’t that the bags under them would hold enough to take him to Brazil. That just meant he was desperately short on sleep. No Frontschwein ever got enough or, too often, any. The look in them worried him more. They were the eyes of a man who’d seen too much, done too much, and knew he had too much more to see and do.

  A lot of Landsers on the Eastern Front had had eyes like that from the end of 1943 on. They knew they wouldn’t whip the Ivans. And they knew they had to keep fighting anyway. It wasn’t despair. Damnation came a lot closer.

  No doubt he’d had that look himself in the old days. Now he had it again. He’d been a kid then. He’d seen all the hideous things that could happen, but somehow he’d been sure they would always happen to someone else. He wasn’t sure of that any more. He knew too well anything could happen to anybody.

  “Surrender!” a Red Army soldier shouted in German. “We’ll treat you well if you do!”

  All the emergency militiamen in the block of flats burst out laughing. They wouldn’t have believed that Quatsch in the last war, let alone this one. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” one of them shouted back. As some of the Ivans could Deutsch sprechen, so a good many Germans had picked up bits of filthy Russian. What other kind was worth learning?

  Of course, yelling Fuck your mother! at people with guns had a price. The Russians started hosing down the building with four heavy machine guns on the same mount. They hadn’t played with that kind of toy the last time. The Germans had; the Americans, too. It made a dandy light flak weapon to chase off low-flying raiders or maybe even shoot them down.

  And, if you pointed it at a ground target, it also did a grand job of chewing that to pieces, along with anyone unlucky enough to be inside. When the mechanized death rattle started outside, Gustav threw himself flat. That was all he could do, that and pray. Hiding behind something wouldn’t help. What could you hide behind to keep off a slug as big as your thumb?

  The one drawback to the monster was that it gobbled ammo at a rate even industrial giants like the Russians and Americans found ridiculous. A minute went through a couple of thousand cartridges. On the other hand, the bullets from those cartridges went through anything this side of a tank out to a kilometer and a half.

  They were shooting a little high. Part of the upper stories of the block of flats collapsed with a rending crash—luckily, not the part right above Gustav. And he’d never look in that mirror again. The Russians must have bought themselves about seven hundred years of bad luck.

  He hoped like anything they had. As soon as the quad gun stopped, he started shooting. He wasn’t the only one, but the return fire was thinner than it would have been before the Russians turned their creature loose. Unless your men were all hiding down in the cellar, they’d take casualties.

  He got a glimpse of somebody with fancy shoulder boards sending soldiers forward. A burst snarled from his PPSh. The Russian officer clutched at himself as he fell over. Dead or wounded, Gustav didn’t care. The bastard was out of the fight. With luck, whoever took over for him wouldn’t know what the plan was. Russians without plans panicked at any little thing. With plans, they would trample you and mash you flat.

  They kept coming without missing a beat, so evidently the plan was to clear out the blocks of flats right around here. Gustav smelled smoke, fresh and strong. Red Army heavy machine guns could fire incendiary rounds. Or any ordinary hot slug might have set something on fire above his head.

  Time to leave, then. Burning a building down was one of the oldest ways to clear it of foes, and still one of the best. Time to leave, before he couldn’t get away. He fed the PPSh a fresh magazine, then bade that bathroom a none too fond farewell. Small sparkling pieces of the mirror crunched under the soles of his boots.

  The rest of the flat was in even worse shape. When he got out into the hallway, he almost bumped into Rolf. They both started to raise their weapons, then stopped when they realized they were on the same side. “Sorry about that,” Gustav said with a sickly grin.

  “It’s all right. That shit happens.” The ex-LAH man’s grin seemed more wolfish than sickly. “Don’t want to stay in the oven till you bake all golden brown?”

  “Fuck golden brown. Fuck you, too,” Gustav said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Rolf started whistling something as they hurried down the stairs to the cellar. Gustav didn’t recognize it at first. Then he did, and almost tripped and broke his neck. It was “Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho! It’s off to work we go,” the dwarfs’ son
g from Snow White. Where the devil did that come from?

  After another second or two, it made…some sense, anyhow. In German lore and legend, dwarfs were mostly underground beings, miners and tunnelers and the like. The German militiamen in Bochum and Essen and now Duisburg used the same skills. The cellars on this block and the next one over all had tunnels running from one to the next. You could move through them, as the two Germans were doing now, or, if you had to, you could fight in them.

  “I haven’t had so much fun in I can’t remember when,” Gustav said as they tramped through the darkness toward the next block farther west.

  “You want fun, go play with yourself,” Rolf answered. “We’ve got to stop the Russians. They’ve trampled almost the whole Vaterland now.”

  “I never would have noticed if you hadn’t told me,” Gustav said. “Why the hell do you think we’re in goddamn Duisburg when we started out in Fulda?”

  “But if Stalin conquers the whole Reich, he’ll Bolshevize it,” Rolf said, as if that were the worst thing he could imagine.

  Gustav could think of worse ones. “If Stalin takes the whole Reich, odds are he’ll kill both of us by the time he does.”

  “If all the Vaterland bows down to the hammer and sickle, I don’t want to live.” Rolf still sounded like a Waffen-SS man, all right.

  “I want to live,” Gustav said. “I want to throw him out of my country. I want to kill Russians. I’m not so very interested in dying myself, thank you very much.”

  “Sometimes death in battle is necessary for the higher good.” Rolf couldn’t strike a pose here in the gloom, but he sounded as if he wanted to.

  It wasn’t that he was wrong: more that an asshole who was right remained an asshole. “If you want to get killed, don’t let me stop you,” Gustav said. Then he froze as a flashlight beam speared him and Rolf from out of the black ahead.

  “Come on, chuckleheads!” said a German voice behind the beam. “We’re going to blow this tunnel in a couple of minutes, to keep the Ivans from following you guys.”

  That got Gustav and Rolf moving, as the soldier with the flashlight no doubt meant it to. Gustav wondered what kind of fieldworks they had on the next block, how long they could hold them, and how many Russians would die attacking them. He lit a smoke. He was starting to like Luckies. And he was still in there fighting.

  IT WAS PAST closing time. Gently but firmly, Daisy Baxter had herded RAF and USAF men out of the Owl and Unicorn into the blacked-out streets of Fakenham. Some of them were liable to fall off their bicycles on the way back to the base at Sculthorpe. They might get knots on their noggins and scrapes on their knees. They were unlikely to smash themselves up the way they could driving drunk in motorcars.

  Surveying the mess, she let out a long sigh. The more they drank, the worse the slobs they became. Empty and almost empty pints everywhere, ashtrays overflowing with butts, cigarettes stubbed out on tabletops, potato-crisp and meat-pie wrappers tossed to the floor…At least no one tonight had thrown up before he could get to the toilets. She hated that.

  Daisy sighed again. She wanted to go to bed herself. It had been another long day. But she had to clean up first. That was one of the rules. You couldn’t sleep till things were tidy. If you didn’t take care of it, the elves wouldn’t, either. You just couldn’t get good elves these days.

  She lit a cigarette. After she’d done it, she wondered why she’d bothered. The smoke already in the pub left the air as thick and gray and curdled as a bad London fog. Just breathing had to give her as much nicotine as the Navy Cut between her index and middle fingers. But there it was, so she finished it.

  Then she got to work. First she emptied the ashtrays and wiped the tables and the long bars clean. Then she swept the garbage off the floor. After she put away the broom and the dustpan, she got the carpet sweeper out of the closet to pick up what they couldn’t. She’d deal with the squadrons of mugs after she took care of that.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Oh, bloody hell!” Daisy exclaimed. She could swear if she felt like it—who was going to hear her and be shocked? And feel like it she did. Every so often, one of the flyers, Yank or British, would decide he had to have one more pint no matter what, and bugger the laws that said he couldn’t till tomorrow. That she’d lose her license for drawing him the pint never bothered him a farthing’s worth. Why should it? It wasn’t his license.

  Sometimes, if she quietly went about her business and pretended the tipsy fool outside wasn’t there, he would give up and go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t, and then she’d have to deal with him. That was almost as much fun as visiting the dentist.

  The one tonight wasn’t going away, damn him. He knocked, paused, knocked some more. Another pause. Some more knocks. He was as regular and persistent as a woodpecker. He had to have a head just as hard as a woodpecker’s, too.

  Daisy muttered something she’d heard once from a liquored-up, belligerent ordnance sergeant. It should have made the tables and chairs catch fire. Muttering some more, she pushed out through the blackout curtains to the door.

  She didn’t open it. Through the wood and the tiny windows—useless now, with no lights on the street—she said, “It’s past closing time. I can’t serve you.” She didn’t say So sod off!, but her voice was full of the suggestion.

  She waited for the angry, beery insistence. She’d been down this road too many times. She was sick of it. Right this second, she was sick of everything that had to do with running a pub.

  But the American voice on the other side of the door didn’t sound beery at all: “I don’t want a pint. I just want to talk to you.”

  She still had to finish cleaning the floor. She had to wash and dry the glass mugs. She found herself opening the door anyhow. “Well, then, you’d better come in, hadn’t you?”

  “Thanks.” Bruce McNulty stepped over the threshold. A little light leaked under the bottom of the blackout curtains: enough to make him seem to have suddenly materialized there. It was also enough to make Daisy shut the door behind him before the wandering air-raid warden walked by and started shouting at her.

  When she pulled the curtains back to let him into the smoky snug, she saw that he was carrying a bouquet of roses. “What in blazes are those?” she demanded, pointing.

  “They’re something to help me say I’m sorry,” McNulty answered. “I was out of line when I stomped out of here the last time I came. I was a jerk, but at least I know I was a jerk.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Daisy said. No one had brought her flowers since Tom, just before he had to go back to the Continent from leave, before he went off on the attack he didn’t come back from. It hadn’t been like him to do such a thing; he’d surprised her—startled her, really. Maybe he’d guessed something. Or maybe all the talk like that was just moonshine.

  “I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to.” McNulty shifted from foot to foot like a nervous schoolboy. “Now I’d better get back to base, huh? I know you’ve got work to do here. You don’t need me hanging around wasting your time.”

  “You’re not wasting my time,” Daisy said. “And thank you very much! I didn’t say that before, did I? They’re—they’re lovely. There was no need—I did say that.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so flustered.

  “My pleasure, believe me. Anyway, I’m gone. But is it okay if I come back as long as the Russians let me?”

  “Of course it is! D’you think I want to see a good customer get away?” But Daisy realized flipness wouldn’t do. When he joked about the Russians, he was trying not to think about flying through the valley of the shadow of death. She had no excuse like that. Quickly, she added, “I didn’t want you to leave to begin with. I lost my temper, that’s all. Believe me, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” he said, which didn’t come within miles of being true. Had he tried to kiss her then, she would have let him. She might have let him do more th
an that, too, which she hadn’t come close to doing in all the years since Tom’s tank brewed up.

  He didn’t, though. He only touched the patent-leather brim of his cap in that way he had, nodded, and walked back out into the quiet night. The door closed. He was gone. Daisy stared at the place where he’d been, then at the roses in her arms. They were sweet. She could smell them through the clouds of tobacco smoke.

  She took them upstairs, to the rooms where she’d never invited any of the men who drank at the Owl and Unicorn. If she left them down in the pub, everybody would wonder who’d given them to her and what she’d done to make him give them. Or rather, they wouldn’t wonder what she’d done. They’d be sure. What else could she have done?

  And then they’d start talking. Somebody would start lying. And her reputation would wind up as flat as the center of Norwich.

  That wouldn’t happen now, anyway. Out of sight, out of mind. A lot of the flyers might well have been out of their minds. Considering what they did to earn what their countries paid them, who could blame them?

  Daisy’d seen only the outskirts of Norwich before the soldiers chased her home. She was no saint even if she didn’t sleep with pilots. She wanted revenge for the city close to home. The men flying out of Sculthorpe were the ones who gave it to her. Good for them, too!

  In the meantime, she still had the mugs to deal with. She set about that, then cleaned out the toilets. Afterwards, she scrubbed her hands with the strongest soap and the hottest water she could stand. They still felt filthy afterwards. They always felt that way after the toilets, no matter how clean she got them. She knew it was in her mind. Knowing didn’t help her change.

  At last, she went upstairs again. Her nose twitched—the roses perfumed her rooms. She smiled. Bruce McNulty knew how to do an apology up brown: no doubt of that. How much that meant, what she ought to do about it…She’d worry about such things some other time. She set the alarm clock, snuggled under the covers, and slept.