Armistice Read online

  “Gergely.” Imre Kovacs wrote it down. “He’s not here, is he?”

  “No. He’s still fighting or in some other camp—there are others, right?—or he caught something.” Istvan had trouble imagining Sergeant Gergely wounded or dead. In his mind’s eye, the veteran was still leading unhappy conscripts and still making them perform as if they’d been soldiering since they were twelve. Some people were born violinists, others born chefs. Gergely had been born to command a squad.

  —

  The doorbell to the little rented house rang. Marian Staley opened the door. Standing on her front porch was the teenage girl who lived next door. “Oh, hi, Betsy,” Marian said. “C’mon in.”

  “Hi, Betsy,” Linda echoed from the front room. She’d just turned six.

  “Hiya, kiddo,” Betsy said. Linda laughed. Betsy turned back to Marian. “You said sixty cents an hour, right? Starting from now?”

  “That’s right.” Resignation filled Marian’s nod and her voice. She was paying the babysitter almost half of what the Shasta Lumber Company paid her. It hardly seemed fair. But she’d got to know Betsy well enough to trust her to keep an eye on Linda for a little while. “Her bedtime is nine o’clock. You can see she’s already in her PJ’s.” She lowered her voice. “Once she’s quiet, help yourself to anything in the icebox, too.” That was part of the deal these days.

  “Thanks.” Betsy sounded as if she meant it. Maybe sounding as if that wasn’t part of the deal was also part of the deal. Or maybe Betsy was a polite kid by nature. Stranger things had happened…Marian supposed.

  A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. Marian opened the door. This time, Fayvl Tabakman walked in. He looked as nervous as if he were going out on his very first date. Marian was nervous, too, but tried not to let it show. She hadn’t been out with anyone since she found out Bill got shot down on a bombing mission.

  “Mr. Tabakman and I are going to see Singin’ in the Rain,” she told Betsy. “I don’t expect anything bad will happen, but call the movie theater if you need to.” Weed, California, was anything but a big town. It had one—count it, one—theater. Betsy couldn’t very well phone the wrong one.

  “Okay,” she said. Her eyes widened. “I didn’t know you knew Mr. Tabakman! My father says he’s great. Dad’s a logger, and he’s mighty glad there’ll finally be an ambulance in town.”

  More than half the men in Weed were loggers. Day by day, year by year, they thinned out the forests that lay in the shadows of Mt. Shasta. It was dangerous work. Doc Toohey did what he could, but the closest hospital was in Redding, more than an hour south down US 99. The lumber companies hadn’t wanted to pay for an ambulance till Tabakman persuaded them to split the cost among themselves.

  “We’ve known each other a long time,” Marian said. “We lived in the same town outside of Seattle, and we were in the same camp after the A-bomb wrecked it.” The inmates, or whatever you called them, had tagged the place Camp Nowhere, but Betsy didn’t need to know that. Marian knew she’d probably be there yet if not for Bill’s military insurance.

  “It vas not’ing,” Fayvl murmured. The cobbler’s English, learned since the war, was fluent but strongly accented. He’d done better in Camp Nowhere than most of the people who washed up there. He’d survived the Nazis’ murder camp at Auschwitz. They’d gassed his wife and children and sent them up in smoke. Even more than Marian, he knew what losing loved ones meant.

  “It wasn’t nothing!” Betsy insisted. “It was great!”

  “Huh.” Praise made Fayvl uncomfortable. Marian had seen that before. He touched the brim of the old-fashioned cloth cap he usually wore. “We go?” he asked her.

  “We go,” Marian agreed. She blew her daughter a kiss. “So long, honey. I’ll see you later.”

  “So long.” Linda was playing with a doll and a stuffed cat that squeaked. If doing without her mommy for a while bothered her, she hid it very well.

  Out they went. Marian closed the front door behind her but didn’t lock it. Like her old neighborhood up in Everett, Washington, Weed wasn’t the kind of place where you worried about burglars. In Camp Nowhere, people swiped anything that wasn’t nailed down. If they saw a way to pry the nails loose, they’d steal those, too.

  Marian’s yellow Studebaker sat in front of the house. The Seattle A-bomb had set dark cars on her block ablaze; her bright one came through unharmed. She and Linda had slept in it at Camp Nowhere. Now she walked past it. Nothing in Weed was more than a few blocks from anything else. She used the car for shopping and to take Linda places and to get to work when the weather turned bad. Otherwise, shank’s mare was plenty good enough.

  She wondered how crowded the theater would be. Singin’ in the Rain was a big hit in the parts of the country that hadn’t had bombs fall on them. It took a while to get to places like Weed, and it wouldn’t stay more than a couple of weeks. But there wasn’t a line or anything. Maybe loggers didn’t care about singing and dancing, even in the rain.

  The girl who sold tickets looked from Fayvl to Marian and kind of smiled. Marian realized they’d just become an item of local gossip. Well, too bad. Inside, Fayvl got popcorn and boxes of Good & Plenty and Cokes. After they found seats, he said, “I never eat popcorn before I come to America. Many good things I find here. This one I do not expect.” He paused. “I find good people here, too.”

  “You’re a good person yourself, Fayvl,” Marian said.

  A newsreel came on when the house lights dimmed. It showed ruins from New York City, more from Boston, and still more from Europe. Other film was of glum Russians with their hands high marching into captivity past knocked-out tanks. People with TVs had already seen these things, but no station was close enough to Weed to come in. Even radio reception here was hit-and-miss.

  Whether or not loggers enjoyed Singin’ in the Rain, Marian did. Gene Kelly was so good, he should have been against the law. Every so often, Marian glanced over at Fayvl. He seemed to be enjoying the picture, too. Once, she looked his way at the same time as he was looking at her. They both turned back toward the screen in a hurry.

  When they got out on the sidewalk again, Fayvl said, “You want maybe a cup coffee and some pie before you go home?”

  “Sure,” Marian said. “Thanks for asking me out. I’ve enjoyed this. I didn’t know if I would, but I did.”

  Weed boasted a couple of diners. “We go to the one right by US 97 and 99?” Fayvl said. “Is better, I think.”

  “Me, too.” Marian nodded. “That’s the first place I stopped when I came to Weed. I liked the place, and I liked the town. I haven’t left since.”

  “And you sent me card of Mt. Shasta,” Fayvl said. “I think, any place must be better than Camp Nowhere. And I know you, and I know Linda, so I come down here to start up mine little shop.”

  Marian nodded. She liked that he mentioned Linda. He and her little girl had always got on well. Maybe he saw something of his own lost children in her. Marian had never asked him that. If he wanted to talk about it, he would. Till he did, if he did, she figured it was none of her business.

  The brassy, redheaded waitress named Babs who’d served her that first day was on duty now. She cackled like a laying hen when Marian and Fayvl came in together. They both ordered coffee. Fayvl got a slice of apple pie; Marian chose blueberry. Babs talked with the guy behind the counter—who doubled as the fry cook—and cackled some more. He rolled his eyes and raised his eyebrows when she got done, but bobbed his head up and down, too.

  When the pie and the coffee were gone, Fayvl raised his index finger to show he was ready for the check. “Forget it,” Babs said. “On the house. You guys should have a nice time. From what I hear, you both been without one for way too long.”

  “You don’t need to do that!” Marian exclaimed.

  “Who said anything about needing? We’re gonna, that’s all,” Babs said in Wanna make something out of it? tones. After that, Marian and Fayvl couldn’t very well do anything but thank her. If the news
about the two of them was going to be all over town, at least the people who’d spread it seemed to think it was good news.

  —

  Vasili Yasevich saw Grigory Papanin across the town square in Smidovich. Papanin saw Vasili, too, and turned and left the square as fast as he could without running. Vasili smiled a nasty smile. Papanin had been Smidovich’s number-one handyman and number-one tough guy till Vasili showed up from across the Amur.

  He had been. He wasn’t any more. His nose was mashed and leaned to one side, part of the damage Vasili had done to him when they tangled. Grigory Papanin had been a big frog in a little puddle. The Russians here didn’t know Vasili’d grown up in Harbin, down in Manchuria. They thought he was a refugee from A-bombed Khabarovsk. Either way, though, he’d learned to be rougher than anyone from a no-account place like this ever could.

  A radio speaker was mounted on a pole in the square. It blared out Radio Moscow at all hours of the day and night: tales of victories and of production surpluses mixed in with music. Vasili didn’t know how much of what he heard to believe. Not much looked like a good guess. Just for instance, Radio Moscow had yet to admit that its signal didn’t originate in the Soviet capital any more, and hadn’t since not long after the war started.

  Not far from the square was the little, barely tolerated marketplace where babushkas and hunters sold what they’d raised or trapped or shot for themselves. The berries and vegetables and venison and birds you found there were expensive, but far better than what you could get at the state food store…when you could get anything at the state food store.

  “Zdrast’ye, David Samuelovich,” Vasili called, seeing a familiar face among the people eyeing mushrooms and heads of cauliflower.

  “Oh, hello,” David Berman answered. The old Jew offered the babushka behind the big, white cauliflowers a price. She just twitched a scornful eyebrow. He came down a few kopeks. This time, she deigned to shake her own head. The haggle was on.

  The trouble with money in the Soviet Union was, even if you had it, you couldn’t do much with it. No one in Smidovich lived much better than anyone else. No one had a fancy limousine with a chauffeur. Hardly anyone had any kind of car. You couldn’t get a car in Smidovich. You might be able to in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Birobidzhan was a real city, if a small one. But if you went from Smidovich to Birobidzhan to buy one, you’d have to drive it back over seventy kilometers or so of unpaved track. Maybe it would still run when it got here, maybe not.

  No one here lived in a mansion, either. No one had cooks or housemaids. The residents who did have more than the others—people like Gleb Sukhanov, the local MGB boss—got what they got because they were powerful, not because they were rolling in rubles.

  Harbin had also been a city under Communist rules. The slogans there and here differed only in language. Power counted there, too. Power, as far as Vasili could see, counted everywhere. But money also mattered. Money in Harbin gave power in a way it didn’t here.

  Vasili always wished he hadn’t thought of Gleb Sukhanov just then. Speak of the Devil and he’ll appear had to be a proverb in almost every language of the world. Up through the market square came the Chekist and three militiamen. They all carried submachine guns. Two of them were hustling along a skinny young woman with her hands cuffed behind her.

  Putting his head down and slowly turning away, Vasili pretended to be absorbed in the quality of a ptarmigan carcass. Not drawing attention to yourself was the best way to keep from drawing fatal attention to yourself.

  But not even the best way worked all the time. Sukhanov proved regrettably quick on the uptake. “There’s Berman!” he barked to the militiamen. “And—Bozhemoi!—there’s Yasevich with him! Freeze, you two! You’re under arrest, in the name of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union! Hands high!”

  For a split second, Vasili thought of going for the Tokarev automatic in his jacket pocket. But one pistol against four PPDs was worse than long odds. It was suicidal odds. As David Berman had before him, he raised his hands above his head. When things went down the drain, you could at least try to meet disaster with style.

  Not that it would help. The militiaman who wasn’t pushing the handcuffed girl along took charge of Berman. He tossed the cauliflower the old Jew had just bought back to the woman who’d sold it, saying, “Here, granny. Where he’s going, he won’t need this.”

  Gleb Sukhanov frisked Vasili himself. He plucked the Tokarev from the pocket where it lived. He found Vasili’s brass knuckles and clasp knife, but not the little holdout knife in his right boot. Holding the pistol, he asked, “Where’d you get this?”

  “From that clapped-out cunt of a Papanin.” Vasili saw no reason not to give him the truth. It wouldn’t matter now. Nothing would.

  He was right. Sukhanov went on, “You—both of you—have conspired to assist in the escape of an inmate of the Corrective Labor Camps, namely this Maria Grunfeld here.” The militiamen holding the young woman shook her to leave no doubt about which Maria Grunfeld their boss meant.

  Vasili hadn’t even known what her last name was. He’d found her when he was walking outside of town. She needed a place to hide. David Berman had lost his wife, and didn’t give a damn about anything any more. Vasili’d hoped she would screw him back to happiness in exchange for safety. And it had worked…till it didn’t any more.

  “Hands down and behind your back,” Sukhanov said. Vasili obeyed. Cuffs bit into his wrists. The militiaman handcuffed Berman, who was about as dangerous as a kitten.

  Off to the town administration center the little parade went. Once they got there, they sent Maria one way and the two men another. Plainly, they already knew what to do with her. She’d go back to the gulag. With Berman and Vasili, they had to start from the beginning.

  Foomp! A tray of flash powder going off in front of Vasili’s face was almost as bright as an atom bomb. He’d seen one, from just far enough away to take no harm. Once he was immortalized on film, Sukhanov separated him from David Berman.

  “The old man will get a twenty-five-ruble bill,” the Chekist said, by which he meant a twenty-five-year stretch in the camps. “Ordinarily, we’d give you the same thing without even thinking about it.”

  Twenty-five years in the gulags? Vasili would be past fifty when they let him out—if he lived to the end of his term, which was anything but certain. He wriggled, trying to make the cuffs hurt less. Nothing did much good. “But?” he said. By the way Sukhanov talked, there had to be a but.

  Sure enough, the MGB man said, “We still haven’t been able to come up with any records on you, not till you showed up here saying you came from Khabarovsk. Nothing to show you were born in the USSR. Nothing to show you ever fulfilled your patriotic obligation during the Great Patriotic War.”

  Vasili kept quiet. Anything he said would only get him in deeper. That was how it looked to him, anyhow.

  “So,” Gleb Sukhanov said, “we can send you to the gulag for your twenty-five, or we can send you to the Red Army and let them knock you into shape. You’re not that old, and you’re all in one piece. That puts you two ahead of most of the recruits they get these days. Your choice—because I’m your friend.”

  By the way he said it, he really meant it. That was one of the scarier things Vasili had ever heard. How would the Red Army knock him into shape if he came into it this way? Probably by using him up, the way clerks used up paper clips.

  But twenty-five years? The war would have to end sooner than that. He might find some angles once they put a uniform on him, too. “Gleb Ivanovich, since you let me pick, I’ll be a soldier. I serve the Soviet Union!” He tried to mouth the phrase as if he’d been saying it since he was four. People on this side of the Amur damn well had.

  “Ochen khorosho!” Sukhanov said. “We’ll put you on a truck for Birobidzhan in a few days, then.” Apologetically, he went on, “I’m afraid we’ll have to keep you in the lockup till we send you off. Can’t have you trying your luck
in the taiga.”

  Vasili didn’t think he could live in the pine woods that stretched across Siberia. To manage that, you needed to learn how from childhood, and he hadn’t. A rifle didn’t hurt, either. That the Chekist worried he might was a compliment of sorts.

  The militiamen didn’t rough him up when they put him in the cell. The honey bucket had a lid. The bed was a straw pallet, but it was there. They fed him slop. At least they fed him enough slop.

  Two days later, they herded him into a wheezing, rattling truck bound for Birobidzhan. The Red Army! he thought. My parents would be so ashamed! They’d hated the October Revolution and everything it stood for. They’d fled to Harbin to escape it, and taken poison after Stalin’s soldiers seized the city in 1945. They’d known what was waiting for them if the Chekists grabbed them. Now the Chekists had grabbed Vasili. What was waiting for him? He’d find out.

  —

  Luisa Hozzel stood with the other female zeks on the open ground near the barbed-wire fence that separated their half of the gulag from the men’s. She thought the count had gone smoothly, but the guards weren’t letting them go to supper. Her stomach growled a protest.

  Trudl Bachman stood beside her. “What now?” Trudl whispered without moving her lips. They’d been friends in Fulda, on the far side of the Eurasian landmass, before the Russians overran it when they invaded West Germany.

  “God only knows,” Luisa whispered back, also doing a fine ventriloquist’s act. She’d never dreamt she would ever need or gain that jailyard skill, not back in Fulda. She had it, though, and it was damned useful.

  Out came the camp commandant, an officer who’d been mutilated too horribly to be useful in combat any more but who could still serve the Soviet Union in a place like this. He had an eye patch and a hook; heaven only knew what his tunic and trousers hid.

  He scowled at the German women as if he hated them. No doubt he did. That was all right. He hated the zeks from his own country just as much.

  He waited. Two hulking guards dragged in a woman in the shapeless, padded clothes prisoners wore. They shoved her. She went down on the dirt. One of them kicked her in the ribs.