Armistice Page 14

  “A good gunner and a good traitor.” Scorn filled Svyatoslav Sverdlovsk’s voice. “How many good socialist Soviet citizens will he kill a dozen times over now?”

  “Sir, I would have stopped him if I’d had the slightest idea.” Konstantin said the kinds of things he had to say to save his skin. This time, he wasn’t even exactly lying. He’d had a good deal more than the slightest idea, and he had tried to stop Eigims. It hadn’t done any good, but he’d tried.

  Sverdlovsk got down to business, saying, “Describe him.” Konstantin did, as accurately as he could. Others could contradict him if he lied here. The Chekist asked, “How well does he speak Russian?”

  “He’s fluent, sir, but he’s got that funny Baltic accent, the one that makes him almost sing words,” Konstantin said. Sverdlovsk scribbled notes in a little black book.

  A buzz overhead interrupted the questioning. It was an American light plane flying along at just above treetop height to get a good look at the Soviet positions. “I could piss that thing out of the sky!” Sverdlovsk burst out. “Why isn’t anybody shooting it down? Bozhemoi!” He clapped an outraged hand to his forehead.

  “I’m just a sergeant, sir. I don’t know anything about that.” What Konstantin said sounded convincing. What he’d heard was, the Yankees wouldn’t fire as long as the Red Army didn’t. That helped the Red Army more than it helped the Yankees, or so things seemed to him.

  “It’s disgraceful.” Sverdlovsk was a Chekist. He mostly didn’t come so close to the front. He could afford to say such things: his dick wasn’t on the block.

  “Sir, I didn’t tell you how things ought to be. All I do is serve the Soviet Union and fight my tank like I’ve been trained,” Morozov said. “I just told you how things are right now.”

  “They shouldn’t be that way, though.” Svyatoslav Sverdlovsk sounded furious. “We should be fighting the enemy, not—not playing games with him.”

  Konstantin spread his hands. “Nichevo.” The Russian word—one of the underpinnings of the Russian soul, really—meant There’s nothing you can do about it or It can’t be helped.

  “I aim to make sure someone hears about this. It’s worse than the shitass Balt’s desertion. It’s damned close to cowardice in the face of the enemy, is what it is.”

  Had the Chekist called Juris Eigims a shitass Balt to his face, he would have lost teeth. “Sir, may I go see if I can find someone to handle the gun on my tank?” Konstantin asked, adding, “If the quiet ends, I need to do all I can for the rodina.” And keep my own shitty ass alive, he finished, but only to himself.

  “Yes. Get the devil out of here,” Sverdlovsk snapped. Morozov came to attention just short of rigor mortis for stiffness, gave a parade-ground salute, and got the devil out of there. The MGB man hadn’t shot him or arrested him. That alone made it a pretty fair morning.

  —

  Marian Staley cut a bite of roast beef with gravy. The beef sat on the heavy white diner plate with mashed potatoes and the same gravy and some boiled string beans. She looked across the table to Fayvl Tabakman. He was eating fried chicken, a potato baked instead of mashed, and his own helping of green beans.

  “Do you think it’s really peace?” she asked.

  “Alevai omayn, it should be peace!” he said. “I hope it’s peace. War is terrible thing.”

  “Oh, is it ever!” Marian said. Her own personal acquaintance with war was brief, but a flash of atomic fire told you everything you ever needed to know in a hurry. And war had robbed her of her husband. Still, she hadn’t lived under its bloody thumb for years, the way Fayvl had. That wasn’t his first encounter with it, either. He would have been a boy when World War I sent armies back and forth across Poland. Marian tried again: “But do you think it is?”

  “If the politicians can get it right, yes,” he said. “How often do they, though?”

  “At least Stalin’s dead,” Marian said.

  “Stalin was very bad man,” Fayvl agreed. He paused, took a bite from a drumstick, and went on, “Except next to Hitler.”

  “Yeah,” Marian said quietly. As Stalin had cost her Bill, so Hitler’d cost Fayvl his whole family.

  The cobbler didn’t want to talk about war. After another bite off the leg, he said, “Fried chicken is so good! In Poland, always we would boil or stew or once in a while bake it. I never eat it fried till I come to United States. You ask me, best way to make it.”

  “It’s pretty tasty, all right.” Actually, Marian had had better fried chicken than the guy who ran the diner made. That was why she’d ordered roast beef tonight. The chicken here wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t great, or not to her.

  “How’s it going, guys?” Babs asked, pausing at their table.

  “Everything’s fine, thanks,” Marian told the waitress. “It always is here.” If she didn’t jump up and down about the chicken, well, that was why the roast beef was on the menu, too.

  Babs raised a questioning eyebrow at Fayvl Tabakman. “Me, I can’t complain,” he said. Then he stopped cold. His face took on a comically astonished expression, as if he couldn’t believe what just came out of his mouth. And that must have been it, for he went on, “I don’t remember last time I couldn’t complain about nothing.” With his accent, the last word came out notting.

  “That’s good. That’s the way things should oughta work,” Babs said.

  Neither Marian nor Fayvl said anything. They glanced at each other, though, and understood each other perfectly. As far as Marian knew, Babs had been born and raised in Weed. She’d had the normal sorrows life brought: not enough money, loves that didn’t last, people who mattered getting old and dying. She didn’t know anything about how bombs and bullets and extermination camps could tear a life to pieces in an instant.

  She also didn’t know how lucky she was to be so ignorant.

  After the two of them finished eating, Fayvl put a five-dollar bill on the table to cover both meals and a nice tip. “With the war, prices have gone through the roof,” Marian said sympathetically. “I wish the lumber outfit would give me another raise to help me catch up.”

  “You should maybe wish for the moon while you’re at it?” Fayvl suggested.

  She laughed a rueful laugh. “That’s about the size of it.”

  As they went outside, she shrugged on her sweater. Weed was high enough so that, even when the days were hot, it got chilly at night. Off to the east, Mt. Shasta’s bulk took a big bite out of the stars. The moon would rise soon, though; its golden glow outlined the mountain.

  Fayvl Tabakman looked that way, too. “Pretty,” he said. “I never seen mountains so big before I come to America. First Mt. Rainier up in Washington, now Mt. Shasta.” After listening to his words in his head, he made a small, annoyed noise. “Should be I never saw mountains, right?”

  “That’s right,” Marian said.

  A man stumbled up to them. “Got any spare change, friends?” he asked.

  Marian would have told him to get lost. Eddie was one of the town lushes. He’d drunk himself out of a logging job—not easy in a place like Weed—and out of his family and onto the streets. He’d keep drinking till his liver quit or he walked in front of a car or froze on a frigid winter night.

  But Fayvl fished in his pockets and gave him a half-dollar. “Obliged, pal,” Eddie said as he lurched away.

  “He’ll just drink it up,” Marian said.

  “Nu?” Fayvl shrugged. “Giving to them who ain’t got is a mitzvah, a blessing. He needs the money. He can do what he wants with it. I know he shouldn’t oughta be a shikker, but how you gonna make him stop?”

  “AA might do it.” But Marian shook her head even as she spoke. You had to want Alcoholics Anonymous to help before it would. All Eddie wanted was enough antifreeze in his blood to keep him from thinking. You weren’t doing him any favors if you helped with that. He would say you weren’t doing him any favors if you didn’t.

  Weed wasn’t overflowing with night life. The movie house was showing a Wes
tern Marian didn’t care about. The bars were full of loggers drinking up their paychecks. Some of them would go the way Eddie had, but what could you do?

  The moon climbed over the mountain’s shoulder. An owl hooted from a pine near the diner that had somehow escaped the axe and the saw. Headlights flowed by on US 99, an endless stream of them. They hadn’t rationed gasoline in this war, the way they did in the last one.

  “You want to walk me home?” Marian asked.

  “Sure. I do that,” Fayvl said. Off they went, not particularly in a hurry. Marian’s little rented house was only a few blocks from the diner. They saw an old lady out for a stroll and two men walking dogs. Away from its row of saloons, Weed was a quiet place. Outside Marian’s door, Fayvl murmured, “Well, I go back to my place now.”

  “Come in for a cup of coffee if you want to,” Marian said as she turned the doorknob.

  “You guys are back sooner than I thought you would be,” Betsy the babysitter said. “I just put Linda to bed ten minutes ago.” Linda stayed in the bedroom, though. Marian wished she could fall asleep so fast herself. She paid Betsy and watched her head off to her own house.

  “Coffee,” she said, and put Folger’s into the percolator that sat on the stove.

  They sat on the secondhand sofa in the living room, their cups on the secondhand table in front of it. Fayvl pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit Marian’s before his own, and somehow made that feel like Old World courtesy and not just an ordinary piece of politeness.

  After he stubbed out his smoke in a glass ashtray, he coughed once or twice and said, “What you suppose Linda think if she come out and find a strange man kissing her mother?”

  He was nearly as hesitant as Marian, which helped explain why they’d gone so slowly. After a cough or two of her own, she answered, “Let’s find out. I don’t think she will, and even if she does you’re not a strange man. She’s known you longer than anybody else in Weed.”

  He slid toward her. She slid toward him, not quite so far. The kiss was hesitant, almost as if it were the first for both of them. Fayvl tasted of tobacco and coffee. Marian supposed she did, too. He wasn’t as big as Bill had been—not much taller than she was herself. Angles changed oddly.

  “Well,” she said when their mouths parted, and then, “We ought to try that again.”

  They did. She might have been—no, she was—ready for more if he pushed it, but he didn’t. That was all right, too. In a place like Weed, there was always plenty of time.

  MIKLOS WAS SCRATCHING at the Arrow Cross tattooed on the back of his hand when that Magyar-speaking American captain strode into the Hungarian POWs’ barracks. The tough guy’s head came up and zeroed in on Imre Kovacs the way a hunting dog’s head would zero in on a deer.

  “Here comes trouble again,” Miklos said in a prison-ground whisper without moving his lips.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Istvan Szolovits answered, doing his best to talk the same way. His best wasn’t as good as Miklos’; he had less practice.

  Up padded Captain Kovacs, as if he had not a care in the world. And why should he? He was an officer. He lived in the United States. He might be a Jew, but he didn’t need to fear mobs or government functionaries wanting him dead. He had the world by the short hairs.

  He nodded to Miklos as if they were friends. Not so many years earlier, had they met in Budapest, Miklos would have smashed his face with a billy club, shoved him into a cattle car, and sent him off to Auschwitz. They both had to know it. Somehow, it didn’t seem to bother either of them.

  Or maybe it did bother Miklos. “You’re one crazy fucker, you know that?” he told Kovacs.

  “Hey, I love you, too,” Kovacs said. “And considering the marks you wear, you’re the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “People can know what I am. I don’t care. It makes things simple, like,” Miklos said. “I don’t gotta waste time with bullshit.”

  Imre Kovacs raised one eyebrow about a millimeter. Istvan wasn’t sure Miklos noticed, but he did. The tiny gesture said the captain didn’t think Miklos had wasted a whole lot of time with bullshit even before he got his decorations. Istvan didn’t, either. Miklos slugged first and asked questions later.

  Then Kovacs nodded Istvan’s way. “Why don’t you come along with me?” he said, for all the world as if Istvan could say no if he wanted to.

  “Where you taking him this time?” Miklos asked suspiciously.

  “Nowhere bad—I promise.” Imre Kovacs winked. “You want me to cross my heart?”

  Miklos told him what he wanted him to do. Istvan didn’t think even an India-rubber man would have been limber enough to manage all of it. Captain Kovacs only laughed. Why not? Who cared what a POW said?

  As the captain and Istvan walked out of the building, Istvan asked, “So where am I coming along with you this time?”

  Kovacs answered with a different question: “Do you speak Yiddish?” He used that language to ask it.

  “I can get by,” Istvan said, also more or less in Yiddish. More or less because…“We never spoke it a lot at home. Some, but not a lot. My folks mostly used Magyar. But I studied German in school, and they’re close. How come you want to know?”

  “Because I know you don’t speak English yet, and most of the Yehudim where you’re going won’t come from Hungary.”

  “Oh?” Alarm ran through Istvan. When you were a prisoner, all change seemed bad. “Where am I going?”

  “I believe they’re sending you to California,” Imre Kovacs answered.

  For a second, that didn’t register. Where in France is California? Or is it in Spain? With that name, it could be. Istvan’s mind spun its wheels like a car trying to get through deep mud. Then he realized what he’d just heard. His jaw dropped. “California?” he whispered, as if saying it out loud would break the spell. “You mean the one in the United States?”

  Kovacs nodded cheerfully. “That’s right.”

  “But why? But how?” Istvan hadn’t felt so staggered, so out of his depth, since he was seventeen and a blond girl who lived in the next-door block of flats decided to let him get lucky.

  The American officer wagged a finger under his nose. “You don’t ask me questions like that. The fairy who handles these things sprinkled you with magic dust, that’s how.”

  So it was a spell. Somehow, that surprised Istvan not a bit. He did his best to pull himself together and think straight. Sometimes being too smart for your own good actually did you good. Sometimes. He asked, “Does the fairy with the magic dust look anything like you?”

  “Officially, I don’t have any idea what the hell you’re talking about,” Kovacs answered. “But a little bird whispered in my ear that she has my nose. Or maybe I have hers—I dunno.” He pointed toward the administration building. “Now come on. We’ve got about a million forms to fill out so we can get you on a plane to the States.”

  Like a man in a dream, Istvan came. So the fairy had Imre Kovacs’ nose, did she? Istvan had a good notion of why the intelligence officer chose him to go to America and not, say, someone like Miklos. Well, wasn’t having friends in high places better than having enemies there, the way Jews did most of the time?

  “What will they do to me in, uh, California?” Istvan still had trouble bringing out the name.

  “They won’t do anything to you, you goose twit.” Kovacs planted a pointy elbow in his ribs. He staggered. He’d got plenty worse on the soccer pitch, but he expected elbows there. This one caught him off guard. The U.S. captain went on, “They’ll question you till you’re blue in the face. Tell ’em whatever you think you can. Then they’ll turn you loose. Somebody will know somebody who can get you a job. How’s that sound?”

  “Insane,” Istvan answered honestly. “Why would anybody do anything like that for me? I’m not anybody. I’m nobody.”

  “Hey, that fairy liked your looks. You’re a smart guy. You get half a chance, who knows what you’ll wind up doing? So all right, you’ve got half a chance.
What the Americans say is, when you get a chance like that, you should run with it. How fast can you run, hey?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out, though, won’t I?” Dizzily, Istvan followed Captain Kovacs into the camp’s administrative center. The officer had exaggerated. There couldn’t have been more than half a million forms. Some were in French, the large majority in English. Istvan read neither. For a while, Kovacs translated for him. Then Istvan threw his hands in the air. “The hell with it!” he said, and signed and signed without worrying about what he was signing.

  “That one you just put your name on says you owe me a hundred thousand dollars,” Kovacs said.

  “Good luck!” Istvan turned out his pockets. “I’ve got, uh, fifty francs here, and ten forints from when I was captured. I forgot all about those.” He shoved the money at Kovacs. “All yours, if you want it.”

  “You need it worse than I do,” Imre Kovacs said, “not that you’ll be able to exchange the forints. Is there anything back at the barracks you have to have?”

  “No.” Istvan shook his head. He wouldn’t have minded grabbing his football boots, but he decided breaking clean was better. He’d have too much explaining to do if he went back in there again.

  “Good. Let’s get to the bottom of this stack, then.”

  At last, Istvan did. Kovacs led him to an American truck newer than but otherwise not much different from the ones the Hungarian People’s Army used. Already in it were a couple of Poles, a Czech, and an East German. They talked among themselves in variously accented Deutsch.

  The truck rumbled away. It went…in whatever direction it went. After a couple of hours, it stopped at an airfield. A German-speaking American steered the liberated POWs to a beat-up C-54. The only other planes Istvan had seen up close were fighters attacking him. He’d never gone inside one before.

  When the engines roared to full throttle, his ears cringed. The transport rumbled down the runway and took off. I’m going to a whole new world, he thought, and then, No. I’m going to the New World.