Armistice Page 16

  “You know what she says about what Russia outside the barbed wire is like, nicht wahr?” Trudl said.

  “Ja.” Luisa had heard Maria go on about that. From what Maria said, Smidovich, the town where she’d been caught, was as full of shabby wooden buildings as this gulag, and not a whole lot better fed. There wasn’t any barbed wire around the town, but where could you go if you left? Into the woods, to starve or freeze.

  Her story was that she’d stayed with an old Jew in Smidovich, pretending to be his niece. That would have been strange for both of them. Maria hadn’t come right out and said how she’d paid for her keep. There was, of course, one obvious answer.

  Luisa hadn’t used that coin since she got hauled out of Fulda and off to Siberia. Neither, as far as she knew, had Trudl, though she thought her friend had come closer than she had. But both of them would have been better off than they were if they’d used their bodies to their advantage.

  When she first got sucked into the gulag, Luisa looked at women who gave themselves to men (or to other women) for their own advantage. They looked like nothing but whores to her. But her own moral perch wasn’t so lofty these days. She’d seen too much since she got here.

  The rations they gave you were just on or just under what you needed to stay alive. The way they worked you in the endless pine woods showed they didn’t care whether you lived or not. If you were on the point of starving or of falling over from exhaustion, why wouldn’t you lie down with a guard or suck off a kitchen worker so you could keep going a while longer? Wouldn’t you be crazy not to?

  She’d never quite come to that point herself. She’d dropped ten or fifteen kilos; she was so tired, she always slept like a dead thing. When she dreamt, all she ever dreamt about was food. But she’d never reached the point of desperation that pushed women here into the arms of the guards.

  Then again, some women here ended up in the arms of the guards for no better—or worse—reason than that they got so horny, they couldn’t stand it any more. When your husband was eight or ten thousand kilometers off to the west, when you had no idea whether you would ever see him again or he was even still alive, shouldn’t you take whatever you could get?

  Some women thought so. Some simply wanted to be cared for, wanted to be wanted, wanted to know men still hoped to sleep with them. Part of what made Luisa hold back was that she kept hoping she would see her Gustav again. And another part, a large part, was that she was so weary all the time, lust never got the chance to raise its head.

  “Trudl,” she said.

  “Was ist’s?” her friend asked.

  “What do you suppose they’ll think of us when we get back to the Vaterland?”

  “You know what? I don’t care,” Trudl said. “If I go back to Fulda, I’ll eat white bread and boiled pork and roast goose and drink beer till it starts running out my ears.”

  “That sounds good. That sounds wonderful!” Luisa exclaimed. “I don’t care, either, or I hope I won’t. Nobody who hasn’t been here’s got the faintest idea of what this place is like. It’s hell on earth, is what it is.”

  “There are some people who haven’t been here who might know what the gulag’s all about,” Trudl said.

  “Who?” Luisa couldn’t think of any.

  But Trudl answered, “The ones who lived through Dachau and Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen and the other Nazi camps.”

  “Oh.” The word was only a breath from Luisa’s lips. Those people had come back to Fulda, and to other places all over Germany, after the Amis and the Tommies (and even the Ivans) took those places away from the SS men who ran them. The conquerors did their best to fatten them up, but so many of them were still walking skeletons with horror and death in their eyes. Ordinary Germans, people who’d looked the other way while they were rounded up and tormented, did their best not to notice them now. You didn’t like to be reminded of what your silence in years gone by had spawned.

  The freed prisoners, the surviving Jews and the far more numerous gentiles, often seemed oddly understanding. Some of them had looked the other way, too, till the midnight knock on their doors. And then a peculiar thing happened. Most of the prisoners turned back into ordinary Germans themselves. Like everyone else, they got on with the business of putting their shattered country back together again.

  Some of them, no doubt, had nightmares where they woke up screaming. But Gustav had had nightmares like that, too. He’d guessed most old Frontschweine did. So that bound the prisoners to their neighbors. It didn’t separate them.

  Luisa expected she would have those nightmares about the gulag. As long as she had them in her warm, soft bed in Fulda, she didn’t care a bit.

  KONSTANTIN MOROZOV SUPPOSED he ought to count himself lucky. The Chekists hadn’t arrested him or just eliminated him after his old gunner ran away to be a bandit in the Baltic republics. His T-54 even had a new gunner now. Pyotr Polikarpov was as Russian as a ruble. He wouldn’t flee the crew on account of harebrained misplaced patriotism.

  The only problem was, he made Konstantin long for Juris Eigims. Eigims might have been—was—a political hothead, but he’d also been a damn good gunner. He knew how to get the best from his piece, and he had a feel for what the enemy might do next that let him anticipate and get off a good first shot.

  Polikarpov had none of that. He was fresh out of training, and he hadn’t learned his lessons well enough. When they practiced, he was slow. He was careless. Like so many Soviet citizens in so many walks of life, he went through the motions without giving a damn about what lay behind them.

  You could get by with that in practice. You shouldn’t, but you could. In combat…“Listen, pussy, you can’t get away with serving your gun while you’re playing with your dick,” Morozov said. “It’s for keeps on the battlefield. The Americans mean it, whether you do or not. I don’t care if they kill you, but if you fuck up they’ll kill me, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Comrade Sergeant,” Polikarpov whined, which could only mean Shut up and leave me alone.

  “Listen, peckerhead. You’ll be a decent gunner by the time I finish with you if I have to whale the shit out of you to get you that way. Hear me? Get me? You’d better, or your worthless ass is mine.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Sergeant!” From Polikarpov’s lips, that also meant Shut up and leave me alone.

  Major Zhuk offered Konstantin no sympathy. “He’s a gunner, Sergeant,” the officer said. “A tank with any gunner functions better than a tank without a gunner. You should be glad I found him for you.”

  “Plenty of other cowflops in the field, sir,” Konstantin said.

  He’d pushed it too far. He knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “That will be enough of that,” Zhuk said in a cold, dead voice. “You are dismissed.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Morozov meant I’m stuck with it, but you’re still full of crap. The major’s scowl said he understood the words below the words he heard.

  What made things worse for Konstantin was that he had no one with whom he could share his worries. He’d pissed off Major Zhuk. His driver, Avram Lipshitz, was new to him. So was Nodar Gachechiladze, which turned out to be the Georgian loader’s handle. And Gachechiladze had more muscle than brains and only the most basic of Russian.

  After another horrendous set of gunnery drills, Konstantin drank himself blind. He regretted it the next morning. You always regretted it the next morning. He regretted it all the more because schnapps hurt you worse than vodka did. His head felt as if he had his own gunnery drills going on in there, only with live ammunition.

  Pyotr Polikarpov said “Good morning” in his usual, stupidly cheerful way.

  “Fuck your mother!” Konstantin snapped.

  The gunner looked wounded. He was only a lance-corporal. He couldn’t challenge his superior. He couldn’t report him, either, not unless he wanted to get in even deeper. All he could do was what he did.

  Morozov glumly ate a mess tin full of shchi all greasy
with pork fat. That coated his stomach—too late, too late!—but left him wondering whether he’d heave. Then he knocked back one more stiff shot of schnapps: the fang of the snake that bit him. After that, he felt human again, though recorded on a faster speed than the one at which he was playing.

  “Comrade Sergeant, are you all right?” Lipshitz asked, watching him down the medicinal dose.

  “I’ll live. I may regret it, but I will,” Konstantin said. “It’s all the Americans’ fault, anyhow.”

  “Comrade Sergeant?” The driver didn’t get it.

  “Never mind.” It made perfect sense to Konstantin, even in his fragile state. If the Americans hadn’t offered halfway decent peace terms, the fighting would have gone on. In that case, Juris Eigims would have stayed too busy trying to save his own neck to go off and do anything stupid in his worthless homeland. And Konstantin never would have got stuck with Pyotr Mikahilovich Polikarpov.

  Two days later, the Georgian sergeant who’d commanded another tank in Konstantin’s platoon also disappeared for parts unknown. That made a certain amount of sense to Konstantin, who hoped Nodar Gachechiladze wouldn’t follow the man’s example. Georgia had got all kinds of preferential treatment while one of its native sons ran the Soviet Union. With Stalin dead and Beria at least out of the picture, the good times would stop. The Russians in charge of things at the moment might even start paying Georgia back.

  Which, if you were a proud, headstrong Georgian like Grigol Orbeliani, meant what? To him, it likely meant you headed back to your homeland and tried to pry it loose from the rest of the USSR. Georgia had gone on under its own princes till the early nineteenth century. Nobody now living remembered the days when it hadn’t been part of Russia or the Soviet Union. People there still sang songs and told stories about freedom, though. Orbeliani, evidently, still took them seriously. How many other blackasses did?

  Not long after Konstantin found out about Orbeliani’s desertion, Major Zhuk called on him. “Now I’m going to have to plug in another commander, the way we had to plug in a new gunner for you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Konstantin said, wondering where his superior was going with this.

  The major didn’t leave him wondering for long: “Whoever I find, whoever they stick me with, odds are he’ll be a tub of manure just like the idiot you’ve got behind your gun.”

  “Yes, sir,” Morozov said again, this time in a different tone of voice. He was amazed. Majors talked with sergeants that way among the Fritzes. Such conversations were much rarer in the Red Army, where most officers were career soldiers and most underofficers just senior conscripts. Zhuk had actually noticed that his tank commander’d been around the block a time or three. Who would have imagined that?

  Gesturing impatiently, the regimental commander said, “Yes, I know Polikarpov is a tub of manure. You think I’m blind? But what can we do? The good men are either already serving the Soviet Union somewhere else or they’re dead or maimed. Even a tub of manure will plug a hole in a dike.”

  “Yes, sir,” Konstantin said one more time. But it didn’t seem enough now, when Major Zhuk was practically apologizing to him. He continued, “If we have to pick up the fight with the Americans, that tub of manure will be dead or maimed pretty damn quick. So will I.”

  “So will the sorry sons of bitches in what was Orbeliani’s tank. He knew what he was doing with it. Fat chance the dickhead we’ll get from the replacement depot will.” Zhuk couldn’t have looked more morose if he’d just watched a T-54 run over his dog. “If we get somebody from the replacement depot. You think the clerks and the mostly better wounded men who go through those places aren’t deserting, too?”

  “Bozhemoi!” Konstantin said. “Comrade Major, I hadn’t thought about that at all.”

  “No reason you should. It’s not your worry. It’s mine,” Zhuk said. Again, in a lot of armies, the Wehrmacht among them, a sergeant might have had to handle such things. Not in the Red Army. Konstantin could read and write, but he knew not a few underofficers who couldn’t.

  “What are we going to do?” Morozov asked. “How can we keep the rot from spreading?”

  “Sergeant, if you find the answer to that one, you’ll deserve the Hero of the Soviet Union medal they pin on your chest,” Zhuk said. “Right this minute, though, I’ve got to tell you I don’t have any idea. I wish I did.”

  “I wish you did, too, sir.” Morozov was still ready to fight—not eager, but ready. But his readiness didn’t do him or his country any good.

  —

  Everything in Los Angeles was a fresh marvel to Istvan Szolovits. They told him the city had taken two A-bombs. If they hadn’t told him, he wouldn’t have known. The city sprawled so, he couldn’t see much damage from where he was. They called this district Westwood. They questioned him on a university campus as big as a small town all by itself.

  Once in a while, though, when the wind blew out of the southwest, a whiff of barnyard and sewage familiar to him from Europe wafted across the green meadows and red brick buildings of the campus. He asked one of his interrogators about it.

  “That’s from the refugee camp over in Santa Monica,” the man answered in Yiddish—his name was Myron Geller. “It’s full of people whose homes got wrecked when the downtown bomb hit. Those people don’t have anywhere else to go. Don’t you go anywhere near that camp. Some of the mamzrim in there, they’ll cut your throat for ten cents.”

  Displaced persons was what they’d called people like that in Europe after the last war. Some were bombed out of their homes, others forced out for political reasons, still others freed from prison camps or concentration camps. Some of them wound up in refugee centers like that. Others avoided them, skulking through the countryside and stealing or robbing as they found the chance.

  “This country is so rich, though,” Istvan said. “You have refugee camps even here?”

  Geller nodded. “Afraid so. One of the things we found out was that A-bombs did more damage than anybody can repair right away.”

  “If you say so.” Istvan had seen more automobiles in Los Angeles in a few days than he had in his whole life before he got here. Drivers were more polite here than in Europe. They often signaled before they turned; horns blared only rarely. All the same, so many cars filled the streets that you took your life in your hands every time you stepped off the curb. Even with the war, the swarms of drivers seemed to have no trouble keeping their machines gassed up. The air had so much car exhaust in it, it smelled bad and burned your eyes.

  “Let’s get back to you,” Geller said, reminding Istvan they’d brought him here to catch questions, not throw them. “How much did you like Matyas Rakosi?”

  “I don’t think anyone could like him. Do you know what he looks like? Horrible, ugly little man,” Istvan answered. “And whenever Stalin coughed, Rakosi caught a cold.”

  “Heh.” Geller gave the small joke a small laugh. “He stayed on the job because he did whatever Stalin told him to?”

  “There’s no other reason I can think of. The Red Army brought him in. He and his pals were in Moscow before, not in Hungary.”

  “Yes, we knew that.” The American Jew nodded. “What did the native Hungarian Communists think of the newcomers?”

  “Not much, from what I hear. I don’t know how that is for myself. I wasn’t a Communist. I was just a student who got conscripted. But what could the people who stayed in Hungary do after Rakosi came back? Rakosi had all the Russian tanks behind him. He still does.”

  “There are uprisings against the Russians here and there in Hungary,” Myron Geller said. “Some of those Russian tanks have met Molotov cocktails.”

  “That kind of stuff was just starting to happen when I got captured,” Istvan said. “Up at the front, that was the news you whispered to a friend you knew you could trust. Anybody else, forget it. You didn’t want the secret police coming down on your head.”

  “You mean the Russians? The MGB?” Geller asked.

  “No, the Hungar
ian police, the AVO,” Istvan answered. “Those guys were meaner, scarier, than the MGB dreamt of being. Some of them really, really believed in what they were doing. And some of them had done dirty work for the Arrow Cross when Szalasi was in power, then just changed uniforms after the Russians brought Rakosi in.”

  “How many of those were there? Are there?”

  Istvan shrugged. “Beats me. All I ever did was hope the AVO never paid any attention to me. But I knew people like that in the Army, too. Bound to be some in the secret police. If you kill everybody who had anything to do with the old government, you have to start over with people who have no idea what the devil they’re doing.”

  “Huh.” Geller scribbled in a notebook. “Well, now I understand one of the things Captain Kovacs put in your file.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’re very good at seeing how things work.”

  “Am I?” Istvan shrugged. “Maybe I am, but what good will it ever do me?”

  “Wait till you learn some English. Won’t take long—it’s an easy language to get the hang of. You’ll get your education, and you’ll still be on the good side of thirty. A smart guy who doesn’t mind working hard can come a long way in America.”

  “I’ll always be a foreigner. They’ll be suspicious of me because of how I talk,” Istvan said.

  “If the USA threw out every smart guy who talked with an accent, they’d have maybe twelve people left,” Geller said. “Come on. Let’s go over to the Gypsy Wagon and get some lunch.”

  The Gypsy Wagon was a hut with a corrugated roof that sold cheap food to UCLA students—and to anyone else with money. Istvan looked as if he could be a student. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and pants they called chinos. Geller was older, his brown hair drawing back at the temples. He might have been a graduate assistant or a junior professor. But he ordered the same hamburger, French fries, and Coca-Cola for himself as he did for Istvan. They ate on the grass. Istvan watched American girls sashay by.