Armistice Page 6

  “Grunfeld, Maria. Г887,” the commandant said. “Former escapee. Now returned to finish atoning for her crimes, and to finish the additional sentence imposed on those who abscond with themselves. She will begin her time with a month in the punishment cells.”

  “Heaven help her!” Luisa prison-whispered. Trudl nodded microscopically. They’d each spent a few days in the punishment block after Maria and several other women escaped. They hadn’t helped. They hadn’t even been in that work gang. But two of the absconders had come out of their barracks. That was all the authorities needed. Sometimes, the authorities didn’t need anything. They did as they pleased here.

  The Gestapo would have been proud of punishment cells. Luisa could think of nothing worse to say about them. They were too low to stand up in, too small to lie down in. You hunched in one corner, because that was all you could do. They didn’t even give you a bucket, so you did your business in the far corner like an animal.

  Food was nasty black bread and water: not much of either. When they let you out after a month in there, you wouldn’t be worth the paper you were printed on. Then you’d go back into your regular work gang and be expected to produce your full work norm right away. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, they might chuck you into a punishment cell again.

  “Before you try to deprive the Soviet state of your labor, think what has happened to Grunfeld, Maria, Г887,” the camp commandant rasped. “Think how you would like it yourselves. Now you are dismissed to supper. Keep thinking about it while you eat.”

  He walked with a limp, too. If he hadn’t stepped smartly in spite of it, the female zeks would have trampled him in their rush to the kitchen. Luisa got a bowl of soupy stew and a brick of black bread bigger than the one they would have doled out in a punishment cell. Add in a glass of weak tea from a battered samovar and….

  As gulag suppers went, it wasn’t too bad. The stew had more cabbage and shredded carrots than nettle and dandelion leaves. There were a couple of bits of what seemed more like potato than turnip, and a chunk of salt fish as big as the last joint of Luisa’s index finger. The bread might be black, but it had more rye and oats than ground-up peas or sawdust. Luisa guessed it was about as bad as the war bread that blighted the memories of Germans old enough to have lived through the Turnip Winter of 1917.

  After supper came latrine call. That was another dash. You had only five minutes to do whatever you had to do. The boards and trenches gave no privacy. The stench would have knocked Satan off his throne in Hell. Luisa hated the latrines worse than anything else in the camp, which was saying a lot.

  Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. That was some poet or other, whether German or English she couldn’t remember. Camp routine had trained her insides to empty completely in those five minutes and in the five after breakfast, and to stay quiet the rest of the day. She wondered if the rhythm would stay ingrained in her after she got out.

  Then she wondered if she would ever get out.

  Most of the time, she didn’t let herself think about that. If you started remembering the world beyond the gulag, you couldn’t live inside it. Now, wiping her filthy hands on her trousers, she couldn’t help herself.

  Fulda. Hot water. A soft bed. A flush toilet. No one screaming at her in a language she barely understood. No mind-numbing, body-ruining labor. And food, all the food she wanted, whenever she wanted it! Eggs and chops and roasts and fruit and pies and cakes! White bread! Butter! Coffee thick with cream! Coffee with whipped cream, Vienna-style! Chocolate! Dear God, chocolate!

  “Are you all right, Luisa?” Trudl Bachman sounded worried.

  Luisa shook her head. “No. Not right this minute. I’ve been remembering.”

  Trudl’s eyes widened with alarm. Back in Fulda, they’d been neighbors and friends. Luisa’s Gustav had worked in the print shop Trudl’s Max ran. They were both veterans, like most German men. When the Russians came over the border, Gustav and Max went off to fight them…again. Luisa had no idea where either man was, or whether they survived. That they’d gone off to fight made their wives suspect to the Reds. Luisa supposed that was why she and Trudl were here now, if they were here now for any reason at all.

  “You mustn’t remember,” Trudl said earnestly. “If you remember what real life is like, this place turns into hell. You have to forget everything about, about before. It’s hard enough even then.”

  It wasn’t as if she were wrong. Their gloomy barracks had wooden bunks stacked four and five high. The mattresses were of sawdust wrapped in burlap ticking. They were hard and lumpy. They smelled bad, and they were full of bugs. You slept in all your clothes, with your boots under your head for a pillow. The cast-iron stove in the center of the hall didn’t throw much heat, and didn’t throw it very far.

  This place turns into hell. Luisa didn’t think Trudl quite had that right. The gulag was hell any which way, as far as she was concerned. She climbed up into her bunk and took off her boots. Her feet stank, too. She lay down. By now, the boots felt as soft and familiar as her old goose-feather pillow. Her eyes closed. She started to snore.

  VASILI YASEVICH HADN’T SEEN much of the USSR after he crossed the Amur. Smidovich had suited him fine…till he got stupid, tried to do a couple of other people a favor, and got caught at it. As soon as he said he’d join the Red Army instead of going into the gulag like Maria and David, all that changed in a hurry.

  He signed some paperwork in Birobidzhan. They poured him into a Red Army uniform there. It didn’t fit. He hadn’t thought it would. He had at least expected it to be new. Too much to hope for. The trousers had several rips sewn up less well than he could have done it himself. A patch on the tunic didn’t fully cover a bloodstain that hadn’t washed out. Both garments were faded and worn.

  The rest of the recruits boarded a westbound train with him. Some carried rifles, others submachine guns like his. About one in four had no weapon at all. They ranged in age from fifteen to fifty-five. Vasili was one of the few anywhere near the midpoint.

  One of the other fellows, an older man, said, “Well, if we’re the best they can do, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel pretty goddamn hard.”

  “If we’re not the best they can do, they would’ve nabbed some other guys,” Vasili answered. “I guess they already have.”

  They were shoehorned onto the hard wooden benches of a third-class car. Men pulled out cards and dice to make the time go by. Gleb Sukhanov hadn’t stolen the cash Vasili had on him when he was seized, so he got into the games. Most of the new soldiers were born suckers. He made money.

  They went through the ruins of Blagoveshchensk, ruins smashed so completely that even the Red Army recruits crossed themselves and said things like “Christ, have mercy!” and “Lord, have mercy!” A sight like the slagged corpse of Blagoveshchensk was more than enough to make the most hardened atheist into a believer. The Trans-Siberian Railway was operating again, though, even if the rest of the city wasn’t.

  How many men had Stalin used to get the railroad running again? How many had he used up? Mao had done the same thing in Harbin after the Americans dropped the A-bomb there. Vasili had been one of the men cleaning up in the Manchurian city, luckily not too close to where the bomb went off.

  His new comrades noticed that he reacted less to the devastation than they did. One of them—the older guy who’d said the Red Army was scraping the bottom of the barrel—asked, “How come it doesn’t bother you?”

  “It bothers me, but I’ve seen it before,” Vasili answered. That much was true. He went on, “If the one that got Khabarovsk had blown a kilometer farther west, I wouldn’t be looking at this shit now.” That was the story he’d told since he got to Smidovich, and he was sticking to it.

  Another man said, “I’m from Khabarovsk, too. I was in Birobidzhan when it hit. Whereabouts did you live?”

  “Near the center of town.”

  “But that’s where it came down. That’s what they say, anyhow.”

  �
��I know. I was over on the west side, visiting a lady friend.” Vasili sketched a female shape with his hands. “She was somebody’s wife, but she wasn’t mine. If I’d been a good boy that night, I would have gone up in smoke. But here I am.”

  “Here you are, all right,” said the fellow who really was from Khabarovsk. “You better look for more sins to commit, on account of you’ve got a brand new chance to get blown up.”

  Some of the sins the recruits suggested argued that they had a lot of experience along those lines. So did the way they talked. Russian in Smidovich was infused with mat, the filthy slang that came from prisoners, political and otherwise. That made sense; plenty of the locals had served their sentences but were still forbidden to go back to their homes on the far side of the distant Urals. But these guys swore all the time. Vasili wondered if Stalin needed soldiers so badly, he’d throw even zeks at the imperialist aggressors.

  On and on the troop train rolled. Vasili learned at first hand just how vast the Soviet Union was. He also saw that Blagoveshchensk wasn’t the only city on the Trans-Siberian Railway the Yankees had A-bombed. No matter how totally flattened the cities were, the train tracks always went through.

  How many Russians were sick with radiation sickness? How many had died? Stalin worried no more than Mao had.

  But the line stopped just short of Moscow. Vasili was sure it couldn’t work that way in normal times. Didn’t the Trans-Siberian Railway run as far as Leningrad? How many times, though, and how recently, had the Americans hit Moscow? How much was left of it? Anything at all? Even Stalin’s daredevil—or conscripted—workers hadn’t punched the railroad through the ravaged Soviet capital again, not yet.

  Trucks took the new men farther west. Transferring from the crowded train was a slow business. Once Vasili was on a truck—no one had bothered to take off the Chevrolet emblem that showed it came from America—he jounced along roads that would have been bad even in Manchuria.

  One of the old-timers, a man who’d been born in the nineteenth century, shook his head in wonder. “I came this way for the Tsar in 1916, and for Stalin in 1944, and now here I am again,” he said.

  They rolled through the night with no lights. Vasili slept five minutes here, ten minutes there, with big bouncy stretches in between. When dawn came, the convoy pulled off the road. Workers, many of them women, concealed the trucks with nets and grass and branches. More women came to the trucks and doled out bowls of shchi. It wasn’t that good and there wasn’t that much of it, but Vasili was hungry enough to lick his bowl clean. He wasn’t the only one.

  “We’ll make a zek out of you yet,” said a fellow who’d plainly seen a lot of hard use. The guy laughed, for all the world as if he were kidding.

  “Why are we hiding here during the day?” a kid asked. He was barely old enough to have zits; the next razor that touched his face would be the first.

  “What do you want to bet American planes’ll shoot us up if we keep heading west while they can see us?” the well-used man said.

  “But we’re beating the Americans! The radio tells us so every day,” the kid bleated.

  “Maybe the Americans don’t listen to Radio Moscow,” Vasili said. A true believer of a monk hearing for the first time someone claim there was no God could have looked no more shocked than that youngster in a uniform as secondhand as his own.

  One truck rear-ended another not long after the darkness came and they set out again. The rest of the convoy, including Vasili’s truck, had to go off the road and through a field, guided by swearing soldiers. The field wasn’t much rougher than the roadway had been.

  This time, they stopped before sunup. In the distance, Vasili heard what sounded like thunder and was probably artillery. Officers moved from truck to truck, talking to the men. Pretty soon, one came to the Chevrolet that carried Vasili and his equally unenthusiastic fellow soldiers.

  “We’re in Poland,” the young lieutenant said. “Polish Fascists have risen up against the People’s Republic. We have to help put down the reactionaries and keep open the supply lines to the bigger war against the Yankee imperialists farther west. Do you understand?”

  What Vasili did understand of that, he didn’t like. Even so, he chorused “We serve the Soviet Union!” with the rest of the men. He’d long since learned that was always the right answer.

  They got ammunition. Most of the men knew how to handle their weapons. Vasili didn’t, but the PPD wasn’t exactly hard to figure out. With a couple of magazines of 7.62mm pistol cartridges, he could fight. He could if he lived long enough to learn how, anyhow. Shouting and cursing, officers urged the new soldiers forward. His first lesson would be coming soon.

  —

  Red Army shells rained down around the foxhole where Rolf Mehlen crouched—where he cowered, if you wanted to get right down to it. He was scared just this side of shitless. He’d known a hell of a lot of brave men, in the last war and in this one. He’d never met anyone who could stay calm and relaxed under a heavy bombardment.

  The biggest trouble was, this was God playing dice with the universe, even if that damn Jew of a physicist said He did no such thing. Whether you lived or died wasn’t up to you. If a shell landed where you happened to be, you wouldn’t be there any more. It was that simple. How good a soldier you were didn’t matter. It was all luck.

  A lot of it was luck any which way. When a stream of machine-gun bullets met your running path, whether one of them hit you or not didn’t have much to do with you. But you could hunch yourself down small and bump up your chances that way. And you had some idea when to run, and in which direction.

  When the big guns bellowed, you huddled and you hoped. And you came out the other side and did some more fighting…or else you didn’t.

  Rolf knew he would be doing more fighting pretty damn quick. The Ivans didn’t shell like this to cover a retreat. When the artillery let up, they’d come. They would have gulped their hundred grams of vodka so they’d quit caring, and they’d be screaming Urra! at the top of their lungs. If some nasty little god particularly hated him, they’d have panzers with them.

  The shelling stopped. As soon as he was sure it had, Rolf stuck up his head. The sooner you spotted the enemy, the sooner you could start killing him. You tried to do it before he got close enough to kill you.

  Just because you tried, that didn’t mean you would. Rolf fixed his Springfield’s bayonet. He made sure he could grab his entrenching tool in a hurry. You could do all kinds of evil things with an entrenching tool.

  They were stirring, out there more than a kilometer to the east. Rolf glanced north. “Max?” he called. “You still there, Max?”

  Max Bachman popped up twenty meters away, like a rabbit coming out of its burrow. Rolf had always thought Bachman looked rabbity anyway. “No, I’m not here,” the printer answered. “I’m taking leave on the Riviera. I’ll be back week after next.”

  “Funny,” Rolf said. “Funny like a belly wound. They’re going to rush us, you know.”

  “They’re going to try,” Max said. “They haven’t got me yet. Maybe they won’t this time.”

  “That would be nice.” Rolf looked toward the Russians again. “Happy fucking day—here they come.”

  “Urra! Urra!” Sure enough, that Russian yell made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. The Ivans didn’t come on in the human waves they’d used so often during the last war. They knew better now; they’d been learning better even then. They’d figured out how to fire and move, probably from their German foes. One group would spray the opposition with bullets while another advanced. Then the second group would flop down and start shooting and the first would leapfrog past it.

  All that made them much harder to kill. It gave them a better chance to kill you, too.

  But Rolf was well dug in. He had a parapet thick enough to stop bullets in front of his hole. The shelling hadn’t blown away the branches and bushes he’d stuck on and in front of the parapet. As the Ivans learned tactics from his side, Ge
rmans had learned about camouflage from the Red Army.

  A good shot could hit out to eight hundred meters with a Springfield, as with a Mauser. Rolf didn’t wear his marksman’s badges—decorations with the swastika were illegal and would get you summarily killed like a Stahlhelm, both. But he’d earned them, and the knack didn’t go away.

  The rifle bucked against his shoulder. A distant khaki figure fell over. He worked the bolt and swung the rifle a little to the right. He fired again. Another Russian crumpled.

  He ducked down as he reloaded this time, and came up half a meter from where he’d been. The foxhole didn’t give him much room to move, but he used what he had. He fired again, and scored another hit. Then he fed a fresh five-round clip into the magazine.

  A bullet cracked past him. A moment later, so did another one. The Ivans had noticed his muzzle flashes, then. That was a shame. He had to keep shooting, or they’d overrun him. He sighed, fired, and swore. He didn’t like missing.

  Mortar bombs started dropping among the oncoming Red Army soldiers. Rolf whooped when a burst sent a Russian cartwheeling through the air. In the next foxhole over, Max also let out a cheer.

  Then three fighter-bombers—obsolescent prop jobs—with RAF roundels zoomed by, so low he could almost reach up and touch their tail wheels. They rocketed and machine-gunned the Ivans. One dropped napalm that torched twenty meters of ground.

  Good Russian troops, like good German troops, would have kept coming in spite of everything. But an awful lot of good Russian troops had gone up in atomic fire. The ones who were left broke sooner than they might have. They’d done their duty, they’d paid for it, and they’d had enough.

  “Let’s hear it for the Jabos,” Max said.

  “Sure is better to have them shooting with us than shooting at us,” Rolf agreed. By the end of the last war, Luftwaffe ground-attack planes had grown scarce as eagles’ teeth. The LAH had been worked over from above by English Typhoons like these in the west and by Soviet Shturmoviks in the east. Yes, it was definitely better to give than to receive.