—
Whenever a motorcar came to the collective farm, Ihor Shevchenko worried. Motorcars meant the authorities. The authorities meant trouble. Ihor’s ancestors—serfs for generations uncounted—would have understood exactly how he felt. The symbols that panicked them might have been different from that black Gaz, but the panic would have been the same.
Two men got out and clumped toward the dining hall. It was early in the morning. People were still spooning up kasha, drinking glasses of tea, and smoking their first cigarettes. Like Ihor, the rest of the kolkhozniks eyed one another in apprehension when the badly tuned engine stopped so close by.
As soon as Ihor saw the men, he knew they had to belong to the MGB. The Chekists didn’t just mean trouble. They meant disaster for whomever their gaze fell upon. These fellows wore gray suits that fit their lumpy bodies none too well. One had a red tie, the other a black. Fedoras sat at a challenging angle on their bullet heads.
They eyed the kolkhozniks in the dining hall the way Ihor would have eyed a chicken he was about to take to the chopping block. “We’re here to bring two men into the service of the glorious, ever-victorious Red Army of the Soviet Union,” the one with the red tie announced. He spoke Russian, of course. To expect a Chekist, even a Chekist born in Kiev, to use Ukrainian would have been to expect the sun to rise in the west. He figured the nervous people in front of him would be able to understand…and he was right. Nodding to his partner, he said, “Read the names, Vanya.”
“I’ll do it,” the one with the black tie—Vanya—said. He fumbled in an inside pocket that held the paper with those names. The fumbling showed he had a shoulder holster, though the bulge under his left arm, and under his boss’, had already warned of that. He unfolded the paper. “First name is Gavrysh, Bogdan Stepanovich.” In his mouth, too, Ukrainian h’s turned to Russian g’s.
Bohdan stared in horror. He always made noises that marked him as a patriotic man. He’d fought against the Nazis, and must have thought the government would keep leaving him alone this time around.
“Come on,” said the MGB man with the red tie—the one who wasn’t Vanya. “Do you serve the Soviet Union or don’t you?”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Bohdan choked out. Any other answer would have sent him to the gulags instead of the Red Army, or maybe into the Red Army after a beating that should have earned him a medical exemption.
His wife put her head down and covered her face with her hands. Elizaveta was shocked, and well she might be. Ihor guessed it wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before she decided she was at least as well off without him. Ihor didn’t know Bohdan was as big a gasbag in private as in public, but it sure seemed likely to him.
Miserably, the kolkhoznik got up and walked over to the two MGB men. The one with the red tie nodded to Vanya. “The other whore, and then we’ll be on our way.” He sounded as if getting out of here was his fondest wish. He also sounded like a zek, dropping mat’ into his talk without noticing he was doing it.
“The other one. Right.” Vanya peered down at the paper again. “Shevchenko, Igor Semyonovich.”
Anya shrieked, then clapped both hands to her mouth. Ihor felt as if someone had slapped him in the face with a meter-long salmon. “You can’t do that!” he said automatically.
Tovarishch Red Tie glowered at him. With the Chekist’s ugly, badly shaved mug, it was a good glower. “No, huh?” he growled. His voice wasn’t deep enough for a truly scary growl, but he did his best with what he had. “You want to find out what we can do and what we can’t, prick?”
“But…But…But…” Ihor unstuck himself. He got to his feet, stepped away from the table—and from his wife—and pulled up his trouser leg to show his scars. “One of your people was here not too long ago. He looked at the leg, and he said the wound was too bad for the Army to take me back.”
“Well, I’m here now, and I’m telling you something fucking else,” the MGB man said. “Get over here with What’s-his-face if you know what’s good for you. You want to get cute, we’ll teach you more about cute than you ever wanted to find out.”
They would, too. And they’d enjoy themselves while they were doing it. Nobody here would lift a finger to save him. If the collective farm rebelled, the Chekists would take a couple of T-34s out of storage—maybe not even the new ones, but the originals with the two-man turret and the smaller gun—and level the place to the ground. They’d shoot the men right away. They’d have their fun with the women, then shoot them, too. All the kolkhozniks knew as much. Ihor could see the sick certainty in their eyes. He was sure they could also see it in his.
He limped over to the Chekists. “Cut the playacting, cuntface,” the one with the red tie said. “Won’t do you no good.”
“It isn’t playacting. It’s how I walk. But…” Ihor drew himself to stiff attention. It wasn’t as if he’d forgotten how. “I serve the Soviet Union!” As well as I can, he added, but only to himself.
“Let’s go,” Red Tie said. Go they did. Ihor looked back over his shoulder once, but only once. Seeing Anya wailing like that made him feel worse, not better.
He and Bohdan got into the Gaz’s back seat. Vanya slammed the door closed behind them. That was when Ihor discovered the rear doors had no latches on the inside. He also discovered that a grill of steel mesh separated the passengers in the back seat from the ones up front.
Vanya drove. Tovarishch Red Tie—Ihor still didn’t know his name—sat on the passenger side and took it easy. “We drop off these dingleberries, then head out to the next worthless fucking dump,” he said.
“That’s about the size of it,” Vanya agreed. “Shitty goddamn job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”
“Hey, we serve the Soviet Union, too,” the other Chekist said. “How are we gonna whip the imperialists without soldiers, huh? Gotta find ’em somewhere. These cunts ain’t much, but they’re better’n nothin’.”
They drove down to Vasilkov, south of Kiev. It had been a small, sleepy town. Now it was bustling: it had taken over many of the functions Kiev had performed till it was visited by hell on earth. The place put Ihor in mind of a four-year-old in a two-year-old’s clothes—it was too big for its britches.
The Gaz stopped in front of a Red Army recruiting station. “We’ll take you inside,” Red Tie told Ihor and Bohdan. “Don’t want anything getting fucked up, the way it could if we just leave you on the sidewalk.” Don’t want you bugging out—Ihor had no trouble reading between the lines.
A sergeant with a patch where his left eye should have been and scars all over that side of his face waved to the MGB men as if they were old friends. They probably were. “Well, what kind of ravens’ meat have you got for me this time?” he called.
“Ravens’ meat? These are veterans! Good, solid men.” Red Tie sounded insulted.
“They’re veterans, are they?” The sergeant’s glower put the Chekist’s to shame, but he had unfair advantages in frightfulness. “You pussies fought the Hitlerites?”
“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor and Bohdan said together.
“Then we don’t even have to waste time with the oath. You swore it the last time, and it still holds.” The cyclops sergeant jabbed a thumb at a doorway behind him. “Go through there. They’ll do your paperwork and kit you out. This time tomorrow, you’ll be on a train heading west. Something to look forward to, hey?”
Ihor looked forward only to going home to Anya. All he wanted to do was stay alive. Now if only the state cared a kopek for what he wanted!
—
When Aaron Finch came to the door, Ruth opened it with the oddest expression on her face. After he kissed her, he asked, “Okay, what’s Leon gone and done?” That was the likeliest thing he could think of to make her wear such a bemused look.
“Leon didn’t do anything,” Ruth said. As if to contradict her, Aaron got attacked by a toddling tornado in a cowboy outfit. Leon hadn’t seen him all day. When you’d just turned two, that was a decent chunk of you
r lifespan.
Once the tickling and rough-housing and other greetings were out of the way, Aaron asked, “Nu? What is going on then?” He was positive something had to be.
By way of reply, his wife took an envelope out of a cut-glass bowl on a little table near the door and handed it to him. “This is for you,” she said.
“Oh,” he said: a little breath of a word. His was not the sort of household that got a letter from the White House, a letter whose envelope was embossed with the Presidential seal, every day. He eyed it in mock alarm. “They must be drafting me.”
Ruth poked him in the ribs. He wriggled to make her happy, even though he wasn’t ticklish. “Open it, you—you bulvan, you,” she said.
“Bulvan!” Leon said happily. He collected new words the way FDR had collected stamps. He had no idea that one was Yiddish, not English. He didn’t know the difference, or care. He didn’t know it meant ox or jerk. He just liked the sound of it.
Open it Aaron did: carefully, so he could keep the envelope for a souvenir along with whatever it held. The stationery had the Presidential emblem at the top of the sheet, too.
“Read!” Ruth said, as if she were Leon demanding a story.
Aaron read: “ ‘Dear Mr. Finch: It is with great pleasure that I congratulate you for the brave action you took in capturing the Soviet aviator who had bailed out of his bomber after attacking Los Angeles. What you did showed courage, quick wits, and patriotism. Americans can and should take you for an example. Your country owes you a debt of gratitude.’ ”
It wasn’t one of those printed letters made to look as if they were typewritten, with a machine signature likewise impersonating the real McCoy. He could feel the way the typewriter’s strokes indented the paper in the back. The President’s signature, sloppy and smeary, was also the genuine article. The typed-by/author line at the bottom left read rc/HST.
Ruth stared at the letter. “Wow!” she said. “That’s something! Well, so are you.” She kissed him.
He wagged a finger at her. “Don’t tell Roxane about it. She’ll think I’m selling out the workers again.”
“She’s not that bad,” Ruth said.
“Like heck she’s not,” Aaron replied. “But if you hadn’t gone to Marvin’s with her that one afternoon, we never would’ve run into each other. I’ll cut her some slack on account of that.”
“I guess we wouldn’t,” Ruth said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“There ought to be stories where some little thing happens differently and everything that comes afterwards gets changed from the way it really was,” Aaron said thoughtfully. “They might be fun, make you think a little while you’re reading. You know, like if the South won the Civil War.”
“Or if the Nazis won World War II.” Ruth showed she got what he was talking about.
He shook his head anyway. “Nobody’s ever gonna want to read about that, not in a million years. What else could a story like that be about except them killing everybody they didn’t like—everybody who wasn’t German, I mean?”
His father and mother had come to America from a little Romanian town. After the war, his older brother up in Oregon (who had lived through the bomb that fell on Portland) had got a couple of letters from a relative on their mother’s side. He’d sent money once. Then the Iron Curtain thudded down, and letters stopped getting through.
Ruth’s family sprang from a village right on the border between Byelorussia and the Ukraine. No one on this side of the Atlantic had heard a word from the ones who didn’t emigrate, not after Hitler invaded the USSR. Those people had to be dead now.
He didn’t want to think about things like that, especially not when he was holding a letter from Harry Truman. Evidently, Ruth didn’t want to think about things like that, either, because she pointed at the letter and said, “You ought to frame it and hang it in the living room. The envelope, too.”
“Maybe I will,” he answered. He was handy with tools; he could make the frame and cut the glass himself. It would be cheap. That notion led to another, one which made him chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” his wife asked.
“I was just thinking about Roxane and Howard again. They’ll be thrilled when they come over and see it, won’t they?”
“They probably will. They aren’t that bad, Aaron. They want America to be better, that’s all.”
“Huh.” Aaron had heard Marvin say the same thing. Saying it, though, didn’t necessarily make it so. But Aaron didn’t push it to a quarrel. Fighting with your wife struck him as a losing proposition. To Marvin, it was something more like sport, though Aaron didn’t believe for a minute that poor Sarah felt the same way. Instead of going on about Roxane and Howard Bauman, Aaron asked, “What smells good?”
“Short ribs,” Ruth answered. “They should be ready any minute. I’ve got ’em stewing with potatoes and carrots and onions and mushrooms.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Aaron said. One of the reasons it sounded wonderful was that it meant some short ribs had made it to the store. They’d eaten a lot of spaghetti with tomato sauce and macaroni and cheese lately. You didn’t need refrigerated railroad cars to ship that kind of stuff into town. For meat, you did.
He splashed Tabasco sauce on his short ribs. Ruth eyed him, but didn’t say anything about it. He splashed Tabasco or horseradish on everything this side of oranges and lemon-meringue pie. He poured hot sauce onto eggs. When he drank beer from a glass and not from the bottle or can, he sprinkled salt into it. Leon loved that because of the way it made the bubbles rise so spectacularly. Like Tabasco, the salt added flavor. He hadn’t had his taste buds shot off in the war, but all those packs of cigarettes had scorched them into submission.
After supper, Ruth washed and he dried. As she used steel wool on the aluminum pot the ribs had stewed in, she remarked, “I wonder how you got that letter.”
“Beats me,” Aaron said. “It’s pretty nice, though, isn’t it?”
“I mean,” Ruth went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “it was in the local news and everything, but how did it get all the way back to Washington?”
“Well, Truman did come out here to inspect the damage, and—” Aaron broke off. He snapped his fingers as an answer glowed like a shooting star inside his head.
“What?” his wife asked.
“I bet Herschel fixed it,” Aaron said. “He gives the Democrats money all the time. I know he’s met Truman. And his business has been rotten since the bombs fell. So maybe he thought this would make me feel good even if it didn’t put any money in my pocket.”
“If he did, he was right,” Ruth said.
“Yeah. I know.” Aaron smiled cynically. “Roxane would say he was just tricking me so I’d go on working for Blue Front without that extra money. She’d be right, too, I guess. But whether she is or whether she ain’t, I’m still gonna frame that letter!”
—
“Down below five hundred meters, Comrade Pilot,” Vladimir Zorin said from the Tu-4’s right-hand seat.
“Thanks. I know. Bozhemoi, but I hate night landings!” Boris Gribkov was keeping an eye on the altimeter, too. At the same time, he was peering out through the bomber’s crappy Plexiglas windshield, looking for the landing lights that would let him put the big plane down.
They wouldn’t be much—he knew that. He’d be landing on a stretch of Autobahn northeast of Munich. The Bavarian city lay in Red Army hands. He was still nervous, not only about the makeshift runway but also about the chance of American marauders. Deliberately, he made himself forget about those. If they jumped him now, he was dead. It was that simple. So he didn’t need to worry about them.
From the bombardier’s position, which had the best view in the plane, Alexander Lavrov called, “I see them, Comrade Pilot! Almost dead ahead—a cunt-hair’s worth to starboard.”
“Good job, Sasha! I see ’em, too—now.” The lights were provided by a bunch of soldiers shining flashlights up into the air. It wouldn’t have worked on a c
loudy night, but it did here. Even as things were, the lights seemed mighty faint to Boris. Well, it wasn’t as if they wanted their presence so far forward advertised—just the opposite, in fact.
“I’m going to land it,” he told Zorin, and then turned the intercom to the all-hands setting. “Crew, strap in and prepare for landing!”
He’d already lowered the flaps to slow the hulking airplane. While he changed course ever so slightly, he watched the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and—as always—the engine temperatures. As he did on takeoffs, he opened the engine cowlings that let heat escape but spoiled the bomber’s aerodynamics.
Bump! He was down, more smoothly than he’d expected. He hit the brakes hard, steering as straight as he could. The Tu-4 needed more than two and a half kilometers of runway to take off fully laden, but a good bit less than that to land with tanks close to dry.
When he came to a stop, a man with a flashlight guided him forward and then off the edge of the paved highway to a waiting revetment with steel mesh on the ground to keep the plane from sinking in. “You did that just right,” Zorin said admiringly.
“Spasibo, Volodya,” Boris answered. “If they’re smart, they’ll have fixed several, depending on where we landed and how far we had to taxi.” He chuckled dryly. “I wouldn’t want to have to back her up.”
“Well,” the copilot said, “no.”
They got out as soon as the props stopped spinning. Groundcrew men were already draping the Tu-4 with camouflage netting. They’d be here only a day or two. No one wanted to give the Americans any excuse to visit.
“Welcome! Welcome!” That well-educated, self-satisfied voice had to belong to a senior officer. Sure enough, the man who owned it went on, “I’m Colonel Madinov. I run this madhouse. We’re going to give the decadent imperialists a kick in the balls they’ll never forget.”
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