Two Fronts (48 page)

His heart thudded with tension as they slid up to firing range. An alert seaman on the Royal Navy submarine was bound to spot the snort and the periscope … wasn’t he? Lemp ordered the
Schnorkel
taken down. They’d do the rest on the batteries.

He launched two torpedoes. Away they whooshed on charges of compressed air. They had about a kilometer to run. They’d gone a little more than half that distance when the enemy U-boat began a sudden, frantic turn. One eel missed the target, but Lemp watched the other strike it in the stern—square in the engine room, in other words.

The English boat went down in a twinkling. The German U-boat men didn’t celebrate the way they usually did when they sank an enemy vessel. They seemed uncommonly subdued.

Lemp wasn’t surprised. He felt the same way. A tiny swing of luck, and the English boat might have sunk them. They’d done what they had to do, but they weren’t proud of it.

Sarah Bruck was peeling turnips when the air-raid sirens began to shrill. She looked at her mother. “Are they crazy?” she said. “It’s one in the afternoon.” The RAF never came over Münster in broad daylight. Hanna Goldman shrugged. “Maybe it’s a drill.”

“Then the people who run the drills are crazy,” Sarah said. When she started thinking about it, that didn’t seem at all unlikely to her. They were Nazis, so they might well be
meshuggeh
.

But, through the sirens’ warble, she soon heard the drone of aircraft engines overhead. She and her mother lay down under the dining-room table: not much protection, but the best they could do.

Bombs whistled down on their city. After a couple of minutes, flak guns all over Münster thundered to irate life. Sarah thought she understood the reason for the delay. The gun crews wouldn’t have been standing by their weapons in broad daylight, the way they did at night. They would no more have expected a daylight raid than Sarah had.

Whether they’d expected one or not, they’d got one. She thought some of the engines roaring up there high in the sky belonged to
Luftwaffe
fighters, not bombers from England. She didn’t know what to feel about that. Like the gunners, they supported the regime that tormented her and the rest of Germany’s Jews. But they were trying to drive away the English pilots dropping bombs on her head. One of the young Englishmen up there right now might have dropped the bomb that had killed her husband and his family.

So shouldn’t she hope a German pilot in a Messerschmitt shot down that Englishman? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? The way things were going, a blind world would gum its food from now until eternity.

A great crashing roar shook the house and rattled the windows. That wasn’t a bomb going off; that was a plane’s whole bomb load blowing up at once as it smashed to earth. At least one fighter pilot or flak-gun crew had scored a success. No more than a minute later, another bomber crashed down a little farther away.

“They’re paying for this,” Sarah’s mother shouted into her ear.

“They are, yes,” Sarah agreed. Was that a good thing or a bad? She still couldn’t make up her mind.
Both at once
was what she wanted to say, but she didn’t think her father would reckon that an acceptable choice.

Thinking of Father made fresh fear stab through her. None of the bombs had fallen close to the house. But he was out in the city somewhere, patching up some of the damage from the RAF’s night raids. She was pretty sure she and Mother would come through this attack all right. But she had no way of knowing where Father was or what sort of shelter from the falling death he’d be able to find. Would he walk through the front door tonight? Would someone from the labor gang knock on the door to let her and Mother know he’d never come home any more? Or would he just be … gone?

Sarah kept her fears to herself. No doubt her mother had them, too, and stayed quiet about them so as not to worry her. Misery didn’t always love company. Sometimes things got worse when you shared them, not better.

Bombing raids always seemed to last forever. When you got the chance to look at a clock afterwards, you were astonished at the small interval during which the RAF planes were actually overhead.

This time, they left after just more than twenty minutes. The sirens went on warbling a while longer. The flak guns went on firing, too. A few chunks of shrapnel clattered down on the roof slates. Nothing sounded heavy, not this time. Once, a big chunk of falling brass had smashed a slate. Father’d gone up there and fixed things before the next time it rained.

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 Münster. 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.

“
Señor …
,” 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,
Señor
.”

“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.