Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  Fujita pulled occupation money out of his pocket. He paid hardly any attention to how much he slapped down. Anna and rupees were fine for the Burmese. They meant nothing to him. Japan still did business in sen and yen.

  As the bartender made the paper disappear, Fujita poured the pint full. He drank. It wasn’t great beer, or even good beer. He hadn’t expected anything different. Where would you get good beer in a third-rate colonial town in the middle of a war? This would keep him drunk and eventually make him drunker. He wasn’t worried about much else.

  He got to the bottom of the pint in three long pulls. “Fill me up again,” he told the bartender.

  “Nan desu-ka?” the Burmese said, sudden apprehension in his voice. “Wakarimasen, gomen nasai.” What? I don’t understand, excuse me.

  “Another. Give me another beer.” Fujita spoke slowly and clearly. You had to make some allowance for stupid foreigners.

  “Ah! Hai!” The barkeep bowed in relief. He got that, all right. Another beer appeared as if by magic. Fujita paid for it. He suspected he could have got away with just taking it after he’d scared the native. But it wasn’t worth fussing about. If he’d been paying with real money instead of this meaningless stuff, it might have been. In occupation cash, though, even a miserably paid Japanese sergeant could play the rich man.

  He sat down at an empty table. A couple of other sergeants were boozing at the one next to it. They owlishly eyed his collar tabs to see whether he was safe to associate with. They must have decided he was, because one of them nodded and said, “Come join us if you want to.”

  “Arigato.” Fujita got up and walked over. He gave his name. One of the other noncoms was called Suzuki; the second was named Ono. Fujita lifted his mug of beer. “Kampai!”

  “Kampai!” They both echoed the toast and drank. Sergeant Suzuki was squat and looked strong. Sergeant Ono was thinner and quieter; Fujita guessed he was clever, at least when he wasn’t drinking. Right now, Ono and Suzuki had quite a start on him. He decided he needed to catch up.

  After a while, Ono remarked, “Haven’t seen you around here before, I don’t think.”

  “Probably not,” Fujita said. “My unit isn’t based in Myitkyina. I just managed to snag some leave.”

  “Ah?” Sergeant Suzuki said. “Which unit is that? Where are you stationed?”

  Fujita sat there and didn’t answer. Unit 113 not only didn’t advertise what it did, it didn’t advertise its existence. He was already starting to feel his beer, but he knew better than to run his big mouth.

  Suzuki scowled. “I asked you a question,” he said, and started to get to his feet. And I’ll knock the crap out of you if you don’t tell me, that meant.

  He was welcome to try. Fujita started to stand, too. He wasn’t scrawny himself, and he figured he knew how to take care of himself. The pub might get knocked around, but that wasn’t his worry.

  But Sergeant Ono put a hand on his drinking buddy’s arm. “Take it easy, Suzuki-san,” he advised. “There are some units out there where the guys can’t talk about what they do.”

  Suzuki grunted. Some people brawled for the fun of it. Fujita mostly didn’t, but he wouldn’t back down, either. Dying was better than losing face that way. Then the burly sergeant grunted again, on a different note this time. “Well, why didn’t he say so?” he growled. He looked right at Fujita. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Because when you can’t talk about something, you can’t say you can’t talk about it, because that makes people get snoopy about why you can’t,” Fujita answered reasonably.

  He thought he was being reasonable, anyhow. Sergeant Suzuki scowled again. Fujita wouldn’t have wanted to serve under him. Sure as sure, he’d be the kind who knocked privates around. “You calling me snoopy?” he rumbled ominously.

  “You were snoopy.” Fujita wasn’t about to back down.

  And Sergeant Ono nodded. “Hai. You were. Come on. We’re here to relax, not to fight among ourselves.”

  “I’ll take you both on.” But Suzuki sat down again and waved to the man behind the bar for another drink. Fujita also waved for a fresh beer. Like Ono, he wasn’t eager to fight, even if he was ready. Getting smashed hurt less-till the next day, anyhow.

  Munster’s jewish cemetery was a sad place, and not just because the dead were lain to rest there. Brownshirt thugs had tipped over a lot of headstones and taken sledgehammers to others. Long, dead grass crunched under the soles of Sarah Bruck’s shoes. The trees’ bare branches reminded her of bones.

  They’d been alive. Then, like that-she hoped it was like that-they were dead. And now, two days later, graves waited for them. Her husband and his father and mother lay shrouded in cloth inside coffins even a pauper’s family would have been ashamed of before the war started. These days, the Reich felt Jews were lucky to get coffins at all. Of course, the Reich would have been happier if they all went into coffins, or at least into the ground.

  Sarah huddled with her own parents near the caskets. A few of the Brucks’ relatives stood with them. Everyone wore the same dazed, shocked expression. Death was never easy. Unexpected death from the air-death at the hands of Hitler’s enemies-where was God, to let such things happen?

  What did Elijah say about Baal? Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is retiring, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. But Sarah wasn’t thinking about long-forgotten Baal. She aimed her cries at Elijah’s God. And He seemed as silent as the old Canaanitish idol.

  A rabbi with a yellow star intoned prayers. Would God be more or less inclined to hear them because he wore the Nazis’ mark? Or was it all just a sham, much sound and fury signifying nothing? Shakespeare knew what he was talking about. Sarah wouldn’t say the same about Elijah.

  Into the holes in the ground went the coffins. Sarah and David Bruck’s brother tossed earth onto them. The sound of the clods hitting the coffins’ thin wooden lids seemed dreadfully final.

  As the gravediggers got to work to finish covering over the bodies, the rabbi led the mourners in the Kaddish. Sarah had learned little Hebrew and less Aramaic, but she knew the prayer by rote: she’d been saying it since her last grandparent died not long before the Nazis took over. She often thought the old people were lucky because they hadn’t lived to see what Hitler did to the Jews.

  After the last omayn, people drifted away from the graveyard. The Brucks’ kin went their way, Sarah and her parents theirs, and the rabbi, his head down, trudged off by himself. Sarah didn’t even want to think about everything he must have put up with since the Fuhrer came to power.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Samuel Goldman said, not for the first time. “Isidor was a good fellow, and too young to be gone.” He set a callused hand on her shoulder. “I know my being sorry doesn’t make you feel any better, but I am anyhow. Your mother is, too.”

  “I am,” Hanna Goldman agreed softly.

  Father was right, as usual-it didn’t make Sarah feel any better. With a sob that was at least half a hiccup, she shrugged his hand away. His mouth twisted, but he let his arm drop. He’d always believed reason and good sense would prevail against anything. The Nazis provided a horrible counterexample to that. Loss of a loved one gave another.

  “What am I going to do?” Sarah said.

  She knew what she’d do for the next little while: she’d stay with her parents, the way she had before navigating the shoals of Nazi bureaucracy to win permission to marry Isidor. All that work, all that tsuris-for what? For nothing. For a bomb howling down out of the sky and killing some Jews who hated Hitler but weren’t allowed to use shelters along with the Reich’s Aryan citizens.

  Father looked around. Seeing no one within earshot, he spoke in an even lower voice than Mother had used a moment before: “The Nazis are our misfortune.”

  No wonder he made sure nobody could overhear him! How many times had Hitler pounded his lectern and thundered The Jews are our misfortune!? More often than Sarah could count, anyho
w. If someone heard one of those Jews mocking his slogan, what would happen to the scoffer? A beating? A trip to Dachau? A bullet in the back of the head? Something along those lines. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

  Mother clucked reproachfully. “Watch yourself, Samuel,” she said.

  “Oh, I do,” he replied. “If I didn’t, our misfortune would already have happened to me.” The professor of classics and ancient history turned street repairman corrected himself with his usual precision: “More of our misfortune would have happened to me, I should say.”

  None of that answered Sarah’s question, of course. Yes, it had been only two days since the air raid. As usual, Jews got their dead into the ground as fast as they could. Then something else occurred to her: “Gevalt! What will any of us do for bread now?”

  “We’ll probably do without, that’s what,” Samuel Goldman said, and he was much too likely to be right. The Brucks’ bakery had been the only one in Munster from which Jews were allowed to buy any. Would the authorities let them visit an Aryan establishment because they had no other choice? Or would the brownshirts declare that it was their own fault the bakery got bombed?

  “I can bake bread,” Mother said, but with no great enthusiasm. And who could blame her for that? Baking every day from scratch was a devil of a lot of work. It wasn’t as if she had lots of time on her hands, or as if she weren’t worn out already.

  “They’ll probably set you to doing it without yeast, and tell me to make bricks without straw.” One of Father’s eyebrows quirked upward toward his graying hair. “My guess is, they would have done it a long time ago if they weren’t so allergic to the Old Testament. I mean, those are tried and true things to make Jews do.”

  “God was the One Who made us bake without yeast. It wasn’t Pharaoh,” Mother pointed out.

  “Well, what if it wasn’t?” Father returned. “You don’t think Hitler thinks he’s God-and expects his good little Aryans to think so, too?”

  A tram rattled past. It needed paint. One of the iron wheels clicked against the track as it went round and round. Repairs weren’t coming any time soon, not with the war on. Sarah wasted no time worrying about that-or about getting on the tram. The motorman would have thrown her and her folks off the trolley had they tried. The yellow star made it easy for Aryans to follow laws against Jews to the letter.

  In normal times, in sane times, Sarah would have had a claim on some of Isidor’s estate. But facing Nazi bureaucrats again was too revolting for her even to think about, much less to do. If David Bruck’s brother wanted to take them on, he was welcome to whatever he could pry out of them.

  “All that time with Isidor-it might as well never have happened,” she said in slow wonder. “He’s-gone.” She still wore her wedding ring. That and a little bit of dirt on her hand from where she’d tossed earth into the grave were almost the only signs she’d ever been married.

  To her surprise, her mother shook her head. “You loved him, and that changed you, too,” Hanna Goldman said. “Love is never wasted. You should always cherish it when you find it, because you never find it often enough.”

  “Listen to your mother.” Samuel Goldman sounded serious to the point of solemnity. “More truth in that than in Plato and Aristotle and both Testaments all lumped together.”

  Was there? Sarah had no idea. Right now, she had no idea about anything. She didn’t even know how much she’d truly loved Isidor. Not so much as she should have-she was pretty sure of that. He hadn’t swept her off her feet: nowhere close. He’d never been a sweeping-off kind of guy. She’d liked him. She’d cared about him. She’d enjoyed the things he did when no one else was around, and she’d liked doing such things for him.

  Did all that add up to love? One more thing she didn’t have the faintest idea about. What she knew was, she wouldn’t get the chance to find out now, not with Isidor she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even have a child to remember him by-one more thing of which she was no longer in any doubt. When you got right down to the bottom of things, life was pretty rotten, wasn’t it?

  Very little that Aristide Demange had seen in Russia impressed him. Very little that the veteran lieutenant had seen anywhere impressed him. He made a point of not being impressed. He’d done it for so long, it was second nature to him by now.

  You couldn’t help noticing Russia’s vastness, though, even if you made your point of doing no more than noticing. You couldn’t help noticing the fine tanks Russian factories turned out, either. Nor could you help noticing the frigid con of a winter Russia had. Well, hell, even Napoleon had noticed the Russian winter, though chances were he’d also done his goddamnedest not to let it impress him.

  And you couldn’t help noticing what a pack of thumb-fingered oafs the Ivans were. Half the time, they didn’t know what to do with all those fancy tanks. Their tactics would have had to loosen up to seem rigid. They drank like swine. Of course, if Demange had had leaders like theirs, he would have drunk that way himself.

  So here was Murmansk. Murmansk had but one raison d’etre: to get men and things into and out of Russia the year around. Thanks to the last gasp of the Gulf Stream as it slid past the northern tip of Scandinavia, the local harbor never iced up. It was the only port in the USSR that could make such a boast.

  But it was at best tenuously connected to the rest of the country. A single rickety rail line led down to Leningrad and ultimately to Moscow. Odds were no one knew how many men had died building that line during the last war, or how many perished every year keeping it usable. If anyone did know, he worked for the NKVD and didn’t care. Demange had seen labor gangs of scrawny prisoners laying fresh ties under the watchful gaze of guards with submachine guns.

  Murmansk itself was ugly as a toadstool. Wood huts housed the people who worked by the harbor. Wood smoke and coal smoke hovered over the town in a choking haze London would have envied. Except for fish pulled fresh from the Arctic Ocean, the food was bad and there wasn’t enough of it.

  He hadn’t got away from the war, either. The Germans knew what Murmansk meant to the Ivans. Their bombers flew out of Norway through the long winter nights and pummeled the harbor and the rest of the city. Russian fighters buzzed overhead. Russian antiaircraft guns yammered away whenever the Luftwaffe came from the west. Russian papers claimed whole squadrons of He-111s and Ju-88s hacked out of the sky. French-speaking Russian officials delighted in translating those stories for any Frenchman who would sit still and listen.

  Demange knew bullshit when he heard it. He also knew he was liable to end up floating in the cold, cold water if he gave forth with his opinions. He assumed anyone who knew French had to work for the NKVD. He smiled and nodded in the right places. Hypocrisy lubricated human affairs here, as it did so often.

  Getting into Murmansk had been an adventure punctuated by Stukas. Getting back to la belle France was liable to be an adventure punctuated by U-boats. A torpedo was the kind of thing that could ruin a troopship’s whole day. And spring was in the calendar.

  It wasn’t in the air. The weather stayed colder than any Frenchman who hadn’t been born in a deep freeze would have believed possible. Blizzards roared down from the North Pole one after another. Snow swirled through the air, thicker than tobacco smoke in an estaminet.

  The French pissed and moaned about it. The stolid Russians clumped through it. Their valenki kept their feet from freezing. Their greatcoats, unlike Western European models, were made to withstand Arctic cold. They wore fur hats with flaps they could lower and tie to keep their ears from going solid and breaking off. And they figured large doses of vodka made the best antifreeze.

  Not even their stolidity, though, could keep the sun from moving farther north in the sky every day. Daylight had been almost nonexistent when Demange got to Murmansk. He liked that fine. Darkness was the best time to get through the Barents Sea without being spotted by German submarines or bombers based in northern Norway.

  But his regiment was somewhere down in the queue. The Russians
were even more fanatical about queuing than the English were, and that said a mouthful. They were less efficient about it, though. And they didn’t have enough freighters in Murmansk to deal with the influx of French soldiers.

  For the life of him, Demange couldn’t see why they didn’t. They were good proletarians, so maybe their diplomats didn’t wear pinstriped trousers the way French officials did. No matter what they wore, they must have spent a lot of time talking the French into climbing out of Hitler’s bed and coming back to Stalin’s. If they wanted French troops out of their country so badly, why in blazes didn’t they have ships waiting to take them away?

  Because they were Russians. That was the only answer Demange could see. They spewed propaganda about the dictatorship of the proletariat and about the glories of centralized planning. When the Germans made noises about planning, they meant them. The Ivans? They were like a chorus of whores singing the praises of virginity.

  It would have been funny if it hadn’t stood a decent chance of getting Demange killed. Once the equinox passed, days in these latitudes stretched like a politician’s conscience. Murmansk went from having no daylight to speak of to having too bloody much in what seemed like nothing flat.

  Demange shepherded his company aboard a rusty scow through more snow flurries. But it was going on nine o’clock at night when he did it, and he had no trouble seeing the falling snow. “Come on, my dears,” he growled. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

  “Don’t you want to get home, Lieutenant?” one of his men asked as they stumped up the gangplank.

  Demange still couldn’t get used to being called Lieutenant. He’d spent too many happy years as a sergeant despising junior officers. Now he’d turned into what he’d scorned for so long.

  To make matters worse, he’d run out of Gitanes. He was reduced to smoking Russian papirosi: a little bit of tobacco at the end of a long paper holder. Russian tobacco tasted funny, and the holder felt wrong in his mouth. All that left him even more short-tempered than usual. “Jules, I want to get home alive,” he answered. “And we’d’ve had a hell of a lot better chance sailing out of here three weeks ago.”