Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  He’d been proud of himself for days afterwards, too. He’d done something useful, and he’d done it well. It wasn’t the kind of thing a professor of classics and ancient history would have known how to do. As far as he was concerned, it made his forced departure from the university and his conscription into the labor gang at least partway worthwhile.

  As the all-clear finally sounded and as the antiaircraft-gun crews at last decided the bombers were really gone, Sarah had to hope memories like that weren’t all she had left of her father. He might be a decorated and wounded veteran of the last war, but as far as the Nazis were concerned he was still a damn Jew.

  She and her mother crawled out from under the table. “Well,” Hanna Goldman said, hands fluffing at her hair, “supper’s going to be later than I thought.”

  “It’s a nuisance, but what can you do?” Sarah wasn’t about to let anyone, even her mother, win a dryer-than-thou competition.

  But, even after the sorry stew-turnips and potatoes and cabbage and a parsnip or two for a hint of sweetness-started bubbling on the stove, any little noise out in the street made her head whip around. Was that Father coming in? Or was that? Or that? Each time, the answer turned out to be no.

  Mother’s head might have been on the same swivel. Neither of them said a word about it.

  But those were footsteps coming up the walk. And they were Samuel Goldman’s irregular footsteps. He’d limped ever since he caught one for the Kaiser, even if the Reich’s current lords and masters gave him precious little credit for it.

  His key turned in the lock. The door opened. To Sarah’s amazement, her father’s face bore an enormous grin. He wore a shabby tweed jacket. He’d lost a lot of weight on bad food and hard labor, so it hung loose on him. It did most of the time, anyhow. It was tight today, and he held one hand under his belly to support whatever was under there.

  “What have you got?” Mother exclaimed, beating Sarah to the punch by a split second.

  Instead of answering directly, Father said, “The Englishmen and the Americans did us a favor today. They were trying to murder us, of course, but they did us a favor anyhow.”

  “The Americans?” Sarah said. “What have the Americans got to do with it?”

  “They sold the RAF these planes-Flying Fortresses, they’re called.” Father said it in English and then in German. Fliegende Festungen: it sounded impressively martial. He went on, “They’re day bombers, all right. They’re stuffed full of armor and machine guns so they can fight their way to where they’re going-except when they get shot down. Some of them did. I watched it happen. But they plastered the rich part of town. We went there to help fight fires and fix water mains and the like. And so …”

  He carefully undid his coat. A small ham and several fat sausages fell on the sofa. So did several tins of meat and a small, squat bottle of cherry brandy.

  Sarah squealed. Her mother just stared at the sudden bounty, her eyes open wider than eyes had any business opening. Samuel Goldman looked proud and sheepish at the same time. “Yes, I’m a looter. Yes, I’m a thief,” he said. “But everybody was doing it, and I’m sick of going hungry all the time. I’ve got four packs of cigarettes-American cigarettes! — in my inside pockets, too. I don’t know how the Party Bonz whose house we went through got hold of them, and I don’t care, either. He’s smoking down below right now, is my best guess. He was nothing but raw meat in a uniform when we found him.”

  An untimely demise like that should have saddened Sarah. But she heard herself saying, “I hope he was the pigdog who gave Isidor and me so much trouble when we wanted to get married, that’s all.”

  “There you go.” Father nodded.

  Mother said, “Now I’m glad the stew isn’t done yet. I’ll chop up one of those sausages and throw it in.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Sarah said. Pretty soon, it smelled wonderful, too. It tasted as good as it smelled. They drank little glasses of brandy to celebrate the feast. Father lovingly smoked a Pall Mall. It smelled different from the dog-ends he usually had to use. By his blissful expression, it also tasted different.

  Father scrounged all kinds of wonderful things when the RAF hit Munster. But he got to do that because the English wrecked homes and shops and killed people. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even come close.

  Chaim Weinberg knew all the stupid things people said about war. One of them was that you never heard the one that got you. The Nationalists were throwing mortar bombs at the Internationals’ trenches. That had to be their second favorite sport, right after what they and most of the rest of the world outside the USA called football.

  Nothing had come down especially close to Chaim. Sanjurjo’s men were missing by so much, in fact, that he was joking about it with Mike Carroll. “See?” he said to his buddy, who hadn’t been back in action long. “The front line is the safest place you can come.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Mike said. “I-”

  There was a brief whining hiss in the air, an understated bang … and all the lights went out for Chaim. When they came on again-he didn’t think it was more than a few seconds later, but he never knew for sure-he saw everything red and his left hand was on fire. He didn’t need long to figure out why his vision had that crimson film. He’d caught a nasty scalp wound, and it poured blood into his eyes. And his hand … It might have looked worse if he’d set it on an anvil and let someone smash it with a sledge hammer, but it also might not have.

  And he was the lucky one. Mike was down and groaning and clutching his belly. Blood poured out between his fingers. A butcher couldn’t have gutted a lamb more neatly-or more thoroughly.

  “Fuck!” Chaim said. “Oh, fuck!” He pulled a hanky out of his pocket. He tried to wipe some of the blood off his own face, then stuck the cotton square on top of his head to slow down the flow there. Scalp wounds always bled like mad bastards and looked worse than they were. He knew that. If this one hadn’t also cracked his skull, he’d get over it. If it had, he was screwed and he couldn’t do anything about it any which way.

  His ruined hand … He had wound dressings in a pouch on his belt. Trying to open one one-handed was something no wounded, half-addled man should have done-except he had no choice. He did a shitty job-there was no other word for it-of wrapping gauze around the wreckage. Then he had to do what he could for his friend.

  All that time safe. All that time lucky. Both of them. He hadn’t caught any real wound at all, and Mike only the one in his leg. Well, that streak got smashed to hell in a split second. Mike had wound dressings, too, but he had more wound than they could hope to dress. He also had a couple of morphine syrettes. Chaim injected him with both of them. Even that was plainly sending a very small boy to do a man’s job, but it was the last favor Chaim could give his buddy.

  He’d thrown away the second empty syrette when he wished he’d given himself some of it. Too late. He didn’t have one of his own, even if he had reminded himself to get hold of one. His hand was screaming louder every second. He wanted to scream himself. He wanted to, and a moment later he did. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the right.

  Mike’s groans quieted. Either the morphine was easing his pain or he was dying. Maybe both those things were true at once. Chaim didn’t know. Even if he had, he couldn’t have done anything about it.

  “Senor …,” someone behind him said: one of the Spaniards who’d joined the Abe Lincolns. Chaim turned to face him. The kid blanched and crossed himself. “?Madre de Dios!” he gabbled. As Chaim had seen with La Martellita, Catholicism stuck to even the Spaniards who reckoned themselves most aggressively modern and secular.

  “I seem worse than I am,” Chaim said, hoping like hell he was telling the truth. “See to Mike first, por favor. I gave him morphine, but.… ” He started to spread his hands, but arrested the gesture before it was well begun. Moving the left one, even a little, made it hurt more than it already did.

  “You have not had morphine yourself?” the Spaniard asked. Chaim
shook his head. That hurt, too. The kid took a syrette out of his own belt pouch and stuck him. Then he bent down beside Mike Carroll. He crossed himself again-a quick, convulsive motion. He looked up at Chaim. “I do not believe he can live, Senor.”

  “Do what you can for him.” Chaim sounded eerily calm. The drug was hitting almost as hard as the mortar bomb had. He still hurt, but it was as if his body were several kilometers from his brain.

  The Spaniard yelled for stretcher-bearers for Carroll. Then he said, “And I will take you back to an aid station. Can you walk?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll both find out, won’t we?” Chaim said. What would they do with his left hand? No-what would they do to it? Would he keep it? If he didn’t, how would he, how could he, get along without it? The morphine made all the questions seem much less urgent than they would have without it. He got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m sorry as hell.” He draped his good arm over the Spaniard’s shoulder. “Let’s go. We’ll see how far I get.”

  He made it all the way to the aid station. That surprised him, and seemed to surprise his helper more. By the time he got there, though, the shot was wearing off. But a doctor took one look at the blood all over his face and at the dripping bandage on his hand and stuck him once more. The pain receded again.

  Morphine or no morphine, he whimpered when the man peeled off the bandage and examined the ruin of his hand. “Can you save it?” Chaim asked.

  “No se, Senor,” the man replied. “It does not looked good, but … Well, perhaps.”

  By the way he spoke, Chaim realized he hadn’t even intended to try till he heard the question. “Do what you can, please,” Chaim said. “I don’t think I can use a rifle one-handed, and I want to get even with Sanjurjo’s putos.”

  The ghost of a smile briefly bent the doctor’s lips. “Let me do what I can here. Then I will send you back to Madrid. Dr. Alvarez there has done some things that surprised more than a few people.”

  “Gracias. De la corazon de mi corazon, gracias.” Chaim did the best he could with his clumsy Spanish. From the heart of my heart? He wouldn’t have said it that way in English.

  He got the message across. “De nada, Senor,” the doctor said. This time, his smile lingered long enough to let Chaim be sure he really saw it. The man went on, “Now I will give you ether and make some preliminary repairs. Then-Madrid.”

  “Madrid,” Chaim echoed. The ether rag came down on his face.

  He thought he would go back to Madrid in an ambulance. He rode in the back of a beat-up Citroen truck with three other wounded men. He was groggy and dopey and hurt a lot in spite of the dope. His hand was swaddled in thick white bandages that got redder and redder as the truck rattled along. His scalp, he discovered, was also properly bandaged. He’d had his hair clipped or shaved off, too. No doubt he looked stupid as hell.

  When they got to the hospital, a male nurse asked, “Which is Dr. Alvarez’s patient?”

  “Aqui estoy,” Chaim answered. Here I am.

  Dr. Alvarez proved to speak English with an accent much more elegant than Chaim’s. He’d studied medicine in London. He cut off the bandages and examined the wound and what the sawbones at the aid station-a man whose name Chaim had never learned-had done to it. Thoughtfully, the English-trained Spaniard rubbed his thin, dark mustache with a forefinger.

  “What do you think, Doc? Can it stay on?” Chaim asked. Speaking English was a relief. Half addled by pain and morphine, he suspected he would have made an even worse hash of Spanish than usual.

  “Oh, yes. I am certain of it-as long as we can avoid an infection in the wound, anyway,” Dr. Alvarez said. “And I hope … No, I believe … I believe that, once the surgical repairs are complete, you will have some function in it. Not full function, perhaps, but you will be able to use your thumb and some of your fingers.”

  “Surgical repairs?” Chaim repeated. “You’re gonna carve on me some more?”

  “It is necessary,” Alvarez replied. Maybe he thought Chaim didn’t want more surgery and he had to talk him into it.

  If he did, he was dead wrong. “Let’s get on with it, then,” Chaim said. The operating room was spotless and had the antiseptic smell of carbolic acid. As long as Nationalist planes didn’t bomb the hospital, Chaim figured he’d come through fine. He smiled at the nurse who put the ether cone over his nose and mouth, and she had gray hair and a face like a horse. Oblivion swallowed him.

  Anastas Mouradian played indifferent chess. Even if it wasn’t the microcosm of war people who didn’t know much about war (or, sometimes, about chess) often claimed, it was a way to make time go by when you weren’t flying. It was less popular than swilling vodka, but easier on the liver.

  He found himself playing more now that he was flying with Isa Mogamedov. The Azeri not only didn’t drink like a Russian, he didn’t even drink like an Armenian. He hardly drank at all, in fact. Stas wondered if he was a pious enough Muslim to find alcohol sinful.

  Mogamedov didn’t say he was, not even when Russian pilots and bomb-aimers teased him for his abstemiousness. Stas didn’t tease him and did play chess with him. Isa would have been an idiot to admit he was a serious believer. The war had put a damper on the Soviet Union’s aggressive atheism, but hadn’t stifled it altogether. Mogamedov just smiled and shrugged and said things like, “If I drink a lot, I get sick, so I don’t drink a lot.”

  He played better than Stas did, but not so much better that Stas had no hope of beating him. He managed a victory about one game in five, which encouraged him to keep playing even though he got trounced most of the time. He sometimes wondered whether Isa threw a game every now and then to keep him interested, but asking about that might have been even less polite than inquiring about religion, so he didn’t.

  Naturally, all the flyers who played fancied themselves as reincarnations of Botvinnik or Tal. Mogamedov beat most of them as easily as he handled Stas. Pretty soon, instead of asking for games, they contented themselves with kibitzing when he and Mouradian sat on opposite sides of the board.

  As far as Stas was concerned, kibitzers were only slightly more welcome than German flak. Most of their advice and criticism came his way, because even the dullest of them could see that Isa didn’t need much help-if that was what it was-from them.

  Stas managed to get into a complicated, crowded midgame position while only a pawn down. He felt moderately pleased; as often as not, the writing was already on the wall by this time. He scratched behind one ear while pondering what to try next. After some thought, he moved a knight.

  “Oh, you wood-pusher!” exclaimed one of the vultures hovering over the board.

  “When I want your opinion, Arkady, I’ll beat it out of you,” Stas said with his sweetest smile.

  Isa sat corpse-still while he was studying a game. His face might have been carved from limestone for all it gave away. When he’d made up his mind, he reached out and took hold of a bishop. It slid across the board and assassinated Stas’ king’s rook’s pawn.

  “See?” Arkady said. “What did I tell you?”

  “Noisy in here, isn’t it?” Stas said to nobody in particular. Expecting the Russian to take a hint was like expecting the Second Coming day after tomorrow. You could do it, but you’d soon end up disappointed. Braining Arkady with a vodka bottle might have won his attention. It would have made people talk about Stas, though.

  He moved the knight again. This time, the move served some obvious purpose: it threatened the bishop that hadn’t gone pawn-killing. Isa pulled it back one square. Stas’ knight advanced again, this time to threaten a rook. Isa slid the rook along the rear rank till it protected the bishop from behind. Of itself, Stas’ hand moved the knight yet again. This time, it forked Isa’s rook and his queen.

  Mogamedov smiled, something he hardly ever did during a game. “You saw all that from the beginning, didn’t you?” He didn’t sound angry or accusing: more like a father who’d just watched a boy do something important on his own, and do it well
.

  “I did.” Stas, by contrast, sounded amazed, because he was. “It was like … like … the sky opening up in front of me, or something.”

  Isa nodded. “It feels that way, yes, when you get the long sight of the board. You should try for it more often.”

  “I didn’t try this time,” Stas said. “It just happened, that’s all.” He felt like an innocent bystander, the way he might have if he were suddenly to witness a highway smashup.

  “You planned all that?” Not so innocent bystander Arkady, by contrast, sounded like someone who didn’t believe it for a minute.

  “Da. I did,” Mouradian answered. He’d seen something like ten moves ahead. He’d never done anything like that before. No matter what Isa said, he doubted he ever would again, either. His head wasn’t geared that way-only it had been, this glorious once.

  Isa Mogamedov raised an eyebrow in Arkady’s direction. “Just because you can’t do something yourself, Comrade, that doesn’t necessarily mean other people aren’t able to.”

  The other, less obnoxious, kibitzers whooped. One of them whistled softly, which might have stung Arkady more. The Russian’s face and ears went hot and red. He stormed away. Without any fuss, Isa moved his queen. Stas took the rook. The game went on. He managed to hang on to the advantage the knight’s tour had given him and to win.

  Afterwards, though, when the board was put away and the kibitzers had disappeared, he spoke in a low voice: “You made an enemy there, I’m afraid.”

  “Who? Arkaday?” Mogamedov snapped his fingers. “That’s how worried about it I am.”

  “He’s a Russian. He’ll know more Russians.” Stas spoke with the resigned annoyance of a nominally equal citizen in a Soviet state where Russians still dominated by weight of numbers and weight of history.

  Mogamedov shrugged. “If they stick me in a gulag, I’ll probably die pretty soon. If I keep flying against the Nazis, I’ll probably die pretty soon, too. So what difference does it make? Chances are it won’t be any fun either way.”