Armistice Read online

  Thinking of Shturmoviks made him cast a wary eye skyward. But no, the Russians weren’t hitting back that way. And they hadn’t thrown any panzers into this attack, at least not around here. Maybe even Russian vastness had limits.

  Hoping it did, Rolf lit a smoke. Over in the next foxhole, Max was doing the same thing. A cigarette after living through a fight was as nice as one right after screwing. Had he heard that from Gustav Hozzel or back in the last war? He couldn’t recall. Gustav, these days, was too dead to ask.

  “You know what I hear?” Bachman said.

  “No,” Rolf said, “but whatever it is, I know you’re gonna tell me.”

  Unfazed, the other German nodded and went on, “The radio says the Russians are having trouble with their satellites. That could be how come they’re not able to put a roll of coins in their fist when they throw punches here.”

  “Only a Dummkopf or an Arschloch believes the Scheisse that comes out of the radio.” Rolf left it to Max to decide for himself whether he was a jerk or an asshole—his generosity just then knew no bounds.

  “I believe the Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians don’t want to dance at the end of Stalin’s puppet strings,” Max said.

  “Well, Christ, who would?” Rolf said.

  “They were just as thrilled about dancing at the end of the Führer’s strings, hey?” Max said.

  Rolf gave him a dirty look. “I didn’t see you peel off your Feldgrau and go join the partisans,” he snapped.

  “No, I had my side and they had theirs,” Max said. “But I’ll tell you, with some of the things we did it’s no wonder they fought us so hard and hated us so much. I should know. I did some of them myself.”

  “Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all,” Rolf said flatly. He’d done a lot of things like that, too. “Far as I’m concerned, they deserved every damn bit of it—and some more besides.” He squeezed the coal off his smoke with thumb and forefinger and saved the butt in his little leather bag. Waste not, want not.

  —

  Ihor Shevchenko crawled through weeds and bushes and bricks towards a new-looking farmhouse that had taken a square hit from a 155. Not much was left of somebody’s hope for the future, in other words. Ihor’s hope for the future was that no foragers had visited the place before him.

  He was careful where he put his hands. Any place Poles had lived, you found broken bottles, and they could slice you up. Once upon a time, most of them had held vodka or schnapps. Stuck between Russians and Germans, the Poles drank both. They drank enough to make Ihor good and sure they were related to Russians, and to Ukrainians like him.

  Was that motion, up there ahead in the ruins? Ihor carried his Kalashnikov everywhere he went. It lay by him when he slept, and across his knees when he squatted to take a dump. He had the bayonet in a sheath on his belt. It made a good enough general-purpose knife.

  The man who warily looked out of the farmhouse wore khaki darker and greener than was usual for a Red Army uniform. His helmet was halfway between what the Fritzes had used and the American pot in shape. That made him a Pole, no two ways about it.

  He had no idea Ihor was there. From less than fifty meters off, Ihor could have bagged him easy as you please. But the shot might have brought the bastard’s buddies running—and Ihor’s buddies with them. He didn’t want a skirmish. He just wanted to scrounge.

  So he tried something else instead. In Ukrainian, he called, “Hey, Polyak!” He pitched his voice just loud enough to carry to the smashed building. He went on, “You understand me when I talk like this?” Ukrainian was a little closer to Polish than Russian was, and maybe a little less likely to make the guy wet his pants.

  The Pole almost did anyway—he damn near jumped out of his shoes. He started to bring up his rifle. It looked like a Mauser, but the Poles had used home-built copies of the German piece during the last war. Then he must have realized Ihor had the drop on him anyway. “Tak, I follow you,” he said.

  That was what Ihor thought he said, anyhow. Tak meant yes in both Ukrainian and Polish, which set them apart from the Russian da. Ihor said, “Want a truce, just you and me, while we go through that place and split whatever we find in there?”

  “I want you to get the fuck out of my country,” the Pole said. “But you could have killed me and you didn’t, so why not?” He leaned his rifle against his leg. “Yeah, I’ll split with you.”

  Cautiously, Ihor came up to his knees and then to his feet. He kept the AK-47 ready to fire, but didn’t aim it at the Pole. As he walked up to the farmhouse, he said, “My name’s Ihor.”

  “I’m Miecyslaw,” the Pole said. When they got close enough, they shook hands. Miecyslaw added, “You’re a goddamn crazy Russian, is what you are.”

  “Who’s a Russian? I’m from right outside of Kiev. Stalin fucked us up the ass before he fucked you, but Hitler fucked us even harder, so what are you gonna do?”

  “The Nazis gave it to us pretty bad, all right. They had Stalin in bed with them at first, remember,” Miecyslaw said.

  Ihor shrugged. “Don’t blame me, man. I’m not Molotov. I didn’t have anything to do with it—except some Fritzes shot me not far from here during the last war.”

  “If you weren’t crazy, I’d be glad to do it now,” Miecyslaw said. “Stalin murdered my cousin at Katyn—he was a captain, and he never came back after the Reds caught him.”

  “I thought the SS did the dirty work there,” Ihor said. That was what the USSR had always loudly insisted.

  But Miecyslaw looked like a man about to gag. “That’s shit,” he said. “It was the fucking Chekists, nobody else but. At least a lot of the Nazis wound up dead. The Chekists are still doing what they did back then.”

  Ihor couldn’t even tell him he was wrong, because he wasn’t. Anyone who lived in the Soviet Union lived in fear of Lavrenti Beria, who ran the MGB. As long as Stalin lived, Beria would thrive. And Ihor couldn’t imagine Stalin dying.

  “It’s a fucked-up pussy of a world, all right,” he said. The Pole nodded. While they weren’t trying to kill each other, they could agree on that much. And if they did try to kill each other, well, didn’t that just show what a fucked-up pussy of a world it was?

  Neither took his eye off the other as they searched the smashed house. Neither fully trusted the other not to start shooting if he saw the chance. Neither meant to give the other that chance.

  They found some canned goods. Miecyslaw looked revolted. “Canned at a canning plant in the Russian part of Germany,” he said.

  “I’ll believe you,” Ihor answered. He could read Russian and Ukrainian, but anything in the Roman alphabet was gibberish to him.

  “The only thing I ever wanted to do with Germans was kill them, not eat their crappy tinned sauerkraut,” Miecyslaw said.

  “Is that what this is?” Ihor had nothing against pickled cabbage. Russians pickled plenty of their own. But he’d hoped for something more interesting. “Whoever lived here took all the booze with him when he left.” Plainly, the family that lived here had escaped: no bloodstains, no stench of death. Ihor continued, “What a rotten thing to do.”

  “Tak.” Miecyslaw eyed him. “You talk funny, and you’ve got that goddamn Red Army uniform on, but you aren’t that bad a guy.”

  “Neither are you,” Ihor allowed.

  “Why are you taking orders from that butcher with a mustache, then?” Miecyslaw said. “Fight for freedom instead.”

  “Where are your tanks? Where are your planes? Where are your A-bombs?” Ihor said. “You cocksuckers may shoot me, but there’ll be nothing left of your shitass country by the time the Red Army gets through with it. When I gamble, I want decent odds.”

  Miecyslaw flinched. Ihor knew what that meant: the Pole had just heard things he hadn’t wanted to tell himself. Ihor had felt that way when he first joined the fight against the Hitlerites. It looked as if they were going to overrun the whole Soviet Union. They didn’t, though.

  But the Soviet Union was bigger than Germany, far bi
gger. It could trade space for time. The Poles facing the Red Army couldn’t.

  “I ought to kill you right here,” Miecyslaw said, which was a common reaction when somebody told you things you didn’t want to tell yourself. “Then some other Pole won’t have to later on.”

  “Well, you can try,” Ihor answered, unobtrusively making sure his Kalashnikov had the safety off. “But you’ve been around the block a few times, right? You take a whack at something like that, it doesn’t come with a guarantee.”

  “Ahh, screw it,” the Polish rebel said. “You could have done for me before I even knew you were there. I owe you that much, anyway. I wish to Christ we could’ve found some hooch in here.”

  “Me, too,” Ihor said with feeling. “Something better than the hundred grams they issue us every day. That crap, it’s as cheap as they can make it. It sure tastes that way.”

  “At least you get the fucking hundred grams,” Miecyslaw said. “With us, we have to find it before we can drink it.”

  “Maybe you should come over to the Soviet side, then. They’d fill you full of vodka if you did.” Ihor meant every word of that. The Red Army treated defectors well…till they weren’t useful any more, anyhow. Then it shipped them off to one gulag or another. Miecyslaw’s horselaugh said he knew that as well as Ihor did. They parted, if not friends, then no worse enemies than they’d been when they met.

  —

  Miklos hit Istvan on the shoulder, not quite hard enough to leave a bruise behind. “Go knock the shit out of those Fritzes, Jewboy!” the Arrow Cross veteran boomed.

  Istvan Szolovits eyed him like an entomologist putting a magnifying glass on some nondescript species. “You’re as crazy as a bedbug,” he said, sticking to the insectile theme. “You fought alongside the Germans. Now you want me to thump ’em?”

  “Those were Adolf’s Fritzes. These are just Stalin’s,” Miklos said scornfully. “These assholes deserve whatever happens to ’em.”

  “You’re a retread,” Istvan pointed out. “How do you know they aren’t, too?”

  That wasn’t the only relevant question. The other one was, What did you do while you fought for the Arrow Cross? For most of the war, Admiral Horthy had protected Hungary’s Jews. After Horthy got ousted for trying to make a separate peace with Stalin, Ferenc Szalasi hadn’t—which was putting it mildly. Close to half a million got shoved onto trains from Budapest to Auschwitz. Only luck and not especially Jewish features had saved Istvan. Was Miklos one of the Arrow Cross goons who’d helped the SS do the shoving? Better not to know, Istvan thought.

  Meanwhile, Miklos said, “Me, I like to fight. I volunteered. How much you wanna bet the Fritzes are all conscripts?”

  A conscript himself, Istvan left that alone for a moment. He didn’t like to fight. He didn’t even like football all that much. But it gave him a place among the POWs, so he played.

  And Miklos was likely to be right—likely, but not certain. How many Fritzes could work up much patriotic zeal for Stalin’s German minions? Probably about as many as the Magyars who were eager to march off to war for Matyas Rakosi. Still…In sly tones, Istvan said, “You never can tell. If Rakosi took an Arrow Cross guy, the Germans might have some real soldiers who used to be Nazis to stiffen the rest.”

  “Could be, I guess. If you find any of those suckers, give ’em a knee in the nuts for Hungary—and for yourself.” Miklos punched Istvan in the shoulder again, harder this time.

  Both football sides wore uniforms of their national colors: red, white, and green for the Hungarians and gold, red, and black for the Germans. Both Germanies had adopted those colors—or been made to adopt them—after the last war. The Weimar Republic had used them before. Hitler’s Reich, like the Kaiser’s a generation earlier, fought under red, black, and white.

  The referee and the linesmen, like all the officials in the prison camp’s football league, were German-speaking French underofficers. They took even less guff from the players than most officials were in the habit of doing.

  Fweet! The man in black blew his whistle. The Hungarians started the action, but the East Germans quickly stole the ball. These two teams were better than the ones the Czechoslovakians and the Poles fielded. Hungarian pros were playing some of the best football in the world when this new war started. The POW side wasn’t within kilometers of them, but tried to imitate their buccaneering style. And Germans just generally seemed to be good at everything—everything except winning wars, anyhow.

  Here came a Fritz in a gold top, as confident as if it were 1940 and he was invading France. He was confident to the point of arrogance, in other words. He dribbled past Istvan like a man who expected no more trouble than he’d get from a stump.

  Then Istvan stuck out a foot, stole the ball, and backheeled it to one his his midfielders. The German did an almost comic double take. He also took a longer look at the man who’d just picked his pocket. “Why, you filthy, stinking kike!” he exclaimed.

  “Up your mother’s dry, smelly cunt, Scheissekopf!” Istvan said sweetly. Having established that they loved each other as fraternal socialist brethren, they got on with the match.

  Pretty soon, another German stomped on Istvan’s instep. The POWs played by rougher rules than professionals could get away with. Istvan hopped for a few steps till the pain went down a little. He bided his time. After a bit, with the referee down at the far end of the pitch, he planted an elbow in a Fritz’s solar plexus. The German folded up like a concertina and tried without much luck to breathe.

  Istvan stood over him. “There you go, diving like a frogman!” he shouted. For some reason, the Fritz didn’t answer.

  Trotting down the pitch, Istvan waited for a whistle, or for the linesman to wave his flag to show the referee he’d fouled. Nothing happened, though some of the Germans watching the match screamed things that weren’t love poetry. He’d got away with it. People got away with breaking the rules a lot of the time. Istvan supposed things would have been even worse without rules. They were bad enough as it was.

  That German took a while to get back on his pins. He didn’t move any too well after he did, either. Football wasn’t some sissy American game. If the Fritz had to come off, his side would go on without him. Substitutions weren’t in the laws.

  Not too much later, a Hungarian let out a shriek when something horrible happened to his knee. That was ruled a foul. Before the Magyars could take their free kick, though, they had to drag him out beyond the touch line. They went on with ten, and the match went downhill from there.

  It ended a 2–2 draw, with nine Germans and eight Hungarians still standing. Istvan was one of them, though blood from his nose dribbled down his chin and onto his shirtfront. After the referee blew the final whistle, he shook his head and said, “Listen to me, you stupid cons—this is supposed to be a game. Don’t kill each other between the white lines. Weren’t you on the same side not so long ago?”

  “Not on the pitch, we weren’t!” a German shouted. Several of the Hungarians nodded.

  The man in black had no weapon but the whistle. But when he blew four long blasts on it, French soldiers with American M-1s came running. “Enough Schweinerei!” he said. No one seemed to want to argue with 7.62mm persuaders (though the Yankees, for reasons Istvan didn’t fully understand, called the caliber .30-06). The footballers glumly mooched off the pitch, each side to its own supporters.

  Miklos folded Istvan into a bear hug. “Hey, that was great!” the tattooed goon said.

  “My ass,” Istvan said.

  “No, it was,” Miklos insisted. “You don’t let anybody fuck around with you, do you?”

  “Not if I can help it.” Istvan’s voice sounded funny in his own ears: his nose was all stuffed up with blood. He realized how tired he was, though war took a harsher toll than football could. After a pause for thought, he went on, “You give somebody the chance to fuck around with you, next thing he’ll do is fuck you over.”

  “Man, you got that right!” Miklos hugged him again.
Istvan didn’t say anything, but it hurt. He’d got elbowed himself, a time or seven. Once Imre Kovacs, that Hungarian-American officer, had said he was too smart for his own good. He wondered why, if he was so goddamn smart, he kept playing football.

  JURIS EIGIMS CAME UP to Konstantin Morozov with the air of a man approaching a partly trained bear that might bite off his arm if it forgot itself. The Balt looked first this way, then that. At last, satisfied that neither their driver nor their loader could hear, he spoke in a low voice: “Comrade Sergeant, may I say something to you?”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Morozov thought he knew the kind of thing the tall, blond gunner was likely to say. He wasn’t at all certain he wanted to hear it.

  “Mm, it depends,” Eigims answered judiciously. “If you’re the kind of guy who reports people to the MGB, I’d better keep my big trap shut. But I don’t think you are.”

  “I never have.” Morozov loved the Chekists no more than any other Russian who didn’t belong to their corps. Just the same, he added, “If you think you can talk me into treason to the rodina, you’d better walk away.”

  “Treason? No, Comrade Sergeant.” Eigims shook his head. “But how likely does it look to you that the Soviet Union’s going to win this war?”

  Instead of answering, Konstantin lit a papiros. The small ritual bought him time to think. He offered Eigims the pack. With muttered thanks, the gunner also lit one of the Russian-style cigarettes with a long paper holder. Their T-54 sat under trees between Einbeck and Northeim; they’d got shoved out of Dassel. Even so, the tank commander said, “You never can tell. Nobody would have given a kopek for our chances in September 1941, either.”

  “That’s true.” Eigims bit the words off short. When the panzers rolled through the Baltics on the way to Leningrad, he wouldn’t have needed to shave. He’d probably cheered the Germans as liberators then; everyone in the Baltics except the Jews had. But Hitler’s soldiers never got into Leningrad, and after a while the tide ran the other way. Which was why Eigims was a Red Army tank gunner these days.