Armistice Page 15

  —

  Boris Gribkov paced along one of the dirt runways. The airstrip wasn’t very far outside of Tula; he could see the town’s taller buildings on the northern horizon. His crew’s new Tu-4 waited for orders in a netted, camouflaged revetment. Since Stalin’s death, no orders had come.

  A groundcrew man lurched down the runway toward him. The path had to be seventy meters wide. Tacking like a galleon fighting a strong headwind, the sergeant needed all of that and could have used more. He gave Boris a sozzled grin as they passed.

  Drunk on duty? Boris could have placed him under arrest and had him shot. Had the war been alive and not in suspended animation, he might have done it. Then again, had the war been alive, chances were the sergeant wouldn’t have gone and grabbed himself a snootful.

  He wasn’t the first loaded mechanic Boris had seen here lately—nowhere near. Like ice on a lake when spring comes at last, discipline was rotting and starting to melt.

  He’d seen drunks aplenty during the Great Patriotic War. He was a Russian, after all. His own people swilled like swine. It wasn’t as if he’d never swilled like a swine himself. But, then, he’d never swilled like a swine because the war was going badly. He’d never seen anyone who had, either.

  That was partly because he hadn’t come into service till 1943. By then, the war against the Nazis was going well. It took two more years of hard fighting to finish, but the result wasn’t in doubt. And that was because the USSR didn’t dare lose the Great Patriotic War. Lose to Hitler, and the Germans would shoot you or enslave you and rape your sister and experiment on your children. The Nazis made that plain right from the start. You had to win.

  It wasn’t like that now. The Americans dropped A-bombs on the Soviet Union, but they didn’t want to invade it. It wasn’t as if the Red Air Force hadn’t A-bombed America, too. The Americans’ terms weren’t vicious, either. All they insisted on was going back where both sides had started from.

  In the last war, Hitler refused to surrender no matter how bad things got. He kept his people fighting, too, for longer than they had any business going on. The way it looked to Boris, things with Stalin worked the same way this time. As long as he lived, nobody dared tell him what a bad idea going on with the war was. But as soon as the Americans finally got him…

  Muttering and shaking his head, Boris went on walking. He knew he would never fly another mission against the United States or any of the countries in Western Europe. That didn’t make him sorry; it made him glad. He didn’t want to destroy great and famous cities. It didn’t bother him enough to make him put a bullet through his head, the way it had with his navigator after they smashed Paris. But it was nothing he wanted to be remembered for.

  He muttered some more. They might fill the Tu-4 with ordinary bombs, or maybe even with an A-bomb, and send it against Prague or Warsaw or Budapest. He’d already bombed Bratislava with conventional weapons—and got shot down for his trouble. He knew he could use conventional bombs if they told him to. Those had been part of warfare since the early days of the century.

  What if they tell me to drop another A-bomb? he wondered. He could see why his country wanted to keep its little western neighbors under control. They’d make trouble if it didn’t. They always had. Still, weren’t A-bombs for the times when you had no other choices?

  Boris thought so. Whether his superiors did was liable to be a different question. But they couldn’t make him fly another mission like that. There was always a way out. Leonid Tsederbaum had shown him that. I just pull the trigger, Boris thought. One second, I’m there. The next, I’m not. As long as he kept his courage, he had the ultimate defense.

  He didn’t much fear death. Death was just nothing, or so it seemed to him. Like going under ether and not waking up. Dying? Dying he feared. He’d seen too much of it. Dying was nasty. It hurt like anything. But if you got it over with all at once, you didn’t need to worry about that. Too much.

  As long as it didn’t come to A-bombs, he could go on doing his job. He hoped it wouldn’t. Had he been a praying man, he would have prayed it didn’t.

  He went up the runway. He went down the runway. He went up the runway again. By that time, he’d walked something close to five kilometers: somewhere close to far enough to work off some of his gloom. Sweatier but easier in his mind, he headed for the field kitchen to get some tea and whatever food the cooks had lying around in the middle of the afternoon.

  A samovar bubbled above a spirit lamp that kept the water inside hot. Boris fixed himself a glass of tea with sugar. He would have liked lemon, but none had come up from the southern regions where they grew. The disruption from all the American A-bombs was visible many ways.

  “What can you give a hungry man?” Boris asked the cook. The soldier’s tunic was unbuttoned. He needed a shave, and had for a couple of days. At a front-line airstrip, none of that would have meant anything. Here in the heartland of the rodina, it was another telling sign of decay. Somebody should have told the kid to shape up. No one had bothered.

  At least he answered politely enough: “We’ve got some sausage, sir, and some onions, and black bread, too.”

  “That’ll work.” Boris nodded. The cook used a bayonet to cut a couple of slices of bread, a hunk of sausage, and some onion.

  Two flyers were playing chess at one of the tables. Boris sat down close enough so he could see the board but not so close as to make them think he was kibitzing. The guy playing black was a pawn up. The older man with the white pieces looked unhappy.

  Boris ate. The sausage was full of pepper and dill. It tasted slightly stale anyhow. He didn’t much care. It filled his empty. The spices and the onion’s bite kept him from paying attention to the gamy flavor. He’d eaten plenty of things a lot worse.

  He was almost finished when Faizulla Ikramov came in. The radioman got himself a glass of tea and walked over to Boris. “May I join you, sir?” he asked.

  “Please,” Gribkov said. Ikramov sat down across the table from him. “They’ll feed you if you want.”

  “That’s all right. I was just looking for something with a little kick to it.”

  “There’s always vodka.” Boris told him of the groundcrew sergeant who’d staggered down the runway.

  “Comrade Pilot, I said a little kick.” Ikramov’s flat Uzbek face twisted into a frown. “Yes, I was raised Muslim, but a shot of vodka every once in a while, that’s not so bad. A bottle of vodka every day, that’s not so good.”

  “I can’t argue with you, not when I feel the same way,” Boris said. “But plenty of people don’t.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed,” Ikramov said, deadpan.

  Boris snorted. “You remind me of a navigator I used to fly with. He’d come out with stuff like that, where if you didn’t pay attention you wouldn’t notice it was funny.”

  “What’s he doing these days?” Ikramov asked.

  “He stuck his pistol in his mouth after we bombed Paris.” Gribkov lowered his voice so the chess players wouldn’t hear.

  “Oh.” For several seconds, the radioman chewed on that. Then he said, “Now I suppose I know what a sense of humor like that gets me.”

  “You didn’t bomb Paris. You bombed Washington. If any town in the world had it coming, Washington did.” Boris grimaced. “And one whole hell of a lot of good bombing it did. We woke the Americans up, and look where we are now.”

  “About where we would have been if we hadn’t bombed Washington, chances are.” Ikramov also dropped his voice. “Do you suppose this is really the way to true Communism?”

  Now there was a question only a fool would answer! But Boris didn’t see how he could ignore it, either. “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” he said after a barely noticeable pause. The radioman beamed at him as if he’d passed a test. And perhaps he had.

  —

  Leon Finch stuck his little finger in his ear and vigorously twisted it. The pediatrician had told Aaron and Ruth never to put anything smaller than an elbow in th
ere, but Leon, unlike his parents, didn’t pay any attention to what Dr. Hurst said.

  Having twisted, he proceeded to show off the treasure his excavation yielded. “Look, Daddy!” he said proudly. “An earwack!”

  “That’s earwax, all right.” Aaron grabbed a Kleenex and took Leon’s booty away from him. “Now go wash you hands.”

  “What will you do with the earwack?” the three-year-old asked.

  “I’m throwing the earwax out.” Just what I want on a lazy Sunday morning, too, Aaron thought. But he made a point of saying the word the right way so Leon would notice and learn.

  Notice Leon did. Learn? Leon’s version of logic came at the world from a different angle. “How come it’s earwax, Daddy? There’s only one of it.”

  Aaron blinked. Leon had taken wax to be wacks, an obvious plural. Once he’d taken it that way, he’d gone and invented his own singular. Thus earwack was born. It made perfect sense…if you were three. Aaron said, “After you wash your hands, bring me your alphabet blocks. I’ll show you something.”

  He couldn’t have picked a faster way to get Leon to wash. Without more than a token dry, Leon got the box where the blocks lived. “What is it, Daddy?” A puppy waiting for a Dog Yummy couldn’t have been more eager. Aaron could all but see his son’s tail wagging.

  “Here. What does this say?” Aaron used the wooden blocks to spell out WACKS.

  That was a lot of letters. Leon had to work hard to get through them. Not many kids his age could have done it at all, but he did. “Wacks!” In his glee, he all but squealed the word.

  “Good job!” Aaron told him. “Now, what does this say?” This time, he spelled out WAX.

  Leon had to work even harder. X didn’t show up in many words, and he had trouble remembering which sound it made. But when he did, his grin showed off a mouthful of baby teeth. “That says wacks, too!”

  “It sure does.” Aaron nodded. He knew damn well he hadn’t been reading when he was three. He had been read to a lot, though, in English and in Yiddish. He went on, “See, W-A-X is the wax in earwax.” He couldn’t spell earwax with the blocks; it needed two A’s, and the set had only one. Gotta make some more, he told himself. “It doesn’t mean there’s lots of, uh, wackses. It’s just a word that happens to end in the ks sound.”

  “Oh.” Leon contemplating new information was funny enough to sell tickets for. After a moment, he asked, “Are there other weird words like that?” The word wax had to be weird; it broke the rules he thought he knew.

  “Yeah, there are.” Aaron nodded again.

  “Like what?” If Leon asked questions that way after he got bigger, he’d need to be better with his fists than a smart kid was likely to be.

  The first word that sprang into Aaron’s mind was sex. He let that one slide. No matter how smart Leon was, ready for anything that had to do with sex he wasn’t. So Aaron took away the W from WAX and replaced it with a T. “What does this spell?”

  Leon went through his mental gears, moving his lips as he sounded things out letter by letter. “Tax!” he said loudly.

  “You got it. Good for you!” Aaron said.

  “What does tax mean?” Leon asked. It was a little word, but, like sex (though not nearly so much fun), not one likely to show up in a children’s book.

  “A tax is money people give the government so we have soldiers and roads and things like that,” Aaron said. “Not everybody likes to pay a tax, but everybody has to. You get in trouble if you don’t.”

  “Oh,” Leon said again. This time, Aaron thought the explanation flew straight over his son’s head. But then Leon continued, “If you pay, you can have it. If you don’t pay, you can’t have it.”

  “You’re a menace, kiddo-shmiddo,” Aaron said, but he was laughing as he spoke. He knew where that came from. Ruth had told him how Leon wanted a plastic horse at a department store and tried to walk off with it. She’d explained how people bought things to the kid. Plainly, the lesson had stuck.

  “Menace!” Leon liked the sound of the word, whether he knew what it meant or not.

  “That’s right. Here, I’ll show you something else.” Aaron added an E and an S to TAX. “What does this say?”

  Leon gave it his best shot. But no matter how smart he was, he wasn’t ready for two-syllable words. “You read it, Daddy!” he said.

  “It says taxes. That’s how you show more than one tax,” Aaron said. “And if that says taxes, what does this say?” Aaron took the T away from the front of TAXES and replaced it with the W.

  While Leon was working on that, the phone rang. Ruth answered it. When she responded in Yiddish, Aaron pretty drastically cut the possibilities. A moment later, she called, “Honey, it’s Mr. Weissman.”

  “Coming.” Aaron hurried to the telephone. What did his boss need from him on a Sunday morning? He took the handset and said, “Nu?”

  “Sorry to bother you on Sunday, Aaron, but I’ve got a question for you,” Herschel Weissman said in Yiddish.

  “Nu?” Aaron repeated on a slightly different note.

  Still in the mamaloshen, Weissman said, “How do you feel about maybe in a few weeks getting a new partner for the truck?”

  “What’s going on with Jim?” Aaron asked, also in the Old Country language. “He’s not in some kind of tsuris, is he?” He didn’t particularly like Jim Summers; he never had. Jim was an ignorant bigot. He’d liked Joe McCarthy till the junior Senator from Wisconsin got himself blown to radioactive ash. But that didn’t mean Aaron wanted anything to do with costing Summers his job. For anyone who’d gone through the Depression, few sins were blacker.

  “Not with me,” the boss at Blue Front said. “Not with the cops, either, far as I know. No, I think we’ll be getting a new guy in a few weeks, and you’re the best man I have to break him in.”

  “Thanks,” Aaron said. “If I’d known I was that great, I would’ve hit you for a raise a while ago.”

  Weissman laughed, for all the world as if Aaron were kidding. Then he said, “Nu, how does an extra quarter an hour sound, starting when the new guy comes in?”

  “Thank you,” Aaron said, most sincerely this time. Ten more bucks a week wouldn’t put him on Easy Street, but it sure wouldn’t hurt. Then he felt he had to add, “You don’t have to do that, you know.”

  “Who said anything about have to?” Herschel Weissman sounded impatient. “People tell me I have to do something, I tell ’em to geh kak afen yam. But I can do this and not go broke, so I will.”

  “Okay.” Aaron understood his boss’ brand of gruff kindness. It was louder than his own, but otherwise not so very different. He found another question: “Who’s the new guy, anyway?”

  “He’s a Yehuda down on his luck, and he doesn’t speak a whole lot of English,” Weissman answered. “He’s supposed to know what’s what, though.”

  “If he works, we’ll get on fine,” Aaron said. He could see how he’d be better than Jim or most of the other Blue Front men with somebody like that. Yeah, Weissman knew his onions, all right.

  Aaron wondered how much Weissman knew that he wasn’t telling. He didn’t ask. Either it was none of his business or he’d find out soon enough. He said his goodbyes instead. Then he told Ruth, “I just got a quarter raise.”

  “Good!” Ruth visibly counted the cans and boxes she could buy with the extra cash. “For what?”

  “Because I’m cute. Why else?” Aaron said. His wife made a face at him.

  —

  Everyone in the gulag was jumpy, zeks and guards alike. As long as Stalin lived, tormentors and tormented understood how the system worked. And, as Stalin had seemed likely to live forever, victimizers and victims had looked to see things go on that way, too.

  But Stalin was gone. What would the gulags turn into without his strong hand at the controls? And Beria, who’d been Stalin’s deputy and head of the security system, was gone, too. Now nobody knew how things were supposed to work.

  Luisa Hozzel certainly didn’t. All she coul
d do was roll with the punches. And the punches kept coming. Some of the guards were milder with the zeks than they had been before. It was as if they thought they needed character witnesses. And they did.

  Others, though, got even meaner. They seemed to fear that any loosening up would lead straight to a zek uprising. As long as they kept the prisoners afraid, they wouldn’t have to worry so much.

  That would have been plenty bad by itself. But things got worse, as they so often seemed to when Russians were involved. Some guards couldn’t make up their minds whether to be kind or vicious. They’d let you go in sick one day whether you were or not. Two days later, they’d smack you in the face if you asked permission to squat behind a pine and piss.

  “All we can do is try to get through it,” Trudl Bachman said when Luisa complained. “They have the machine pistols. We don’t.”

  “But it’s peace, or almost peace,” Luisa protested. “Shouldn’t they put us on trains and send us home? They aren’t fighting in Germany any more. They won’t stay in our part of Germany.”

  “Almost peace isn’t peace,” Trudl said. “And what happens after they finally send us home?”

  Luisa knew the answer to that. She’d been holding it close to her for a long time, like an extra ace up her sleeve in a card game. “We go to the newspapers, that’s what,” she said fiercely. “We tell the whole world what filthy animals the Russians are. It’s the truth, too.”

  “Of course it is,” Trudl said. “But do you think the Russians don’t know it? They hide everything from the outside world, the way the Nazis hid their murder camps. They’re uncultured”—she used the Russian nye kultyurny, which was much stronger than its German equivalent—“but they know how uncultured they are. They don’t want anyone else to find out.”

  Trudl made much more sense than Luisa wished she did. “By that logic, they’ll kill us instead of letting us go,” Luisa said.

  “I know,” Trudl said bleakly. “Have you talked to Maria Grunfeld?”

  “Some,” Luisa answered. You had to be careful with what you said to anybody who’d got dragged back after an escape. The authorities were too likely to think she was giving you ideas, or that you were looking for them.