After the Downfall (42 page)

He didn’t bother naming the God he’d left behind in the ruins of Berlin. Once upon a time, he’d been a believing Christian. How you could go on being a believing Christian after five and a half years of war ... Well, he hadn’t, so what point worrying about that? And they already had plenty of deities running around loose here. What did they need with another one imported by the only man who’d once believed in Him?

“I don’t know,” Drepteaza answered with another of those disarming grins. “The goddess is real - that is plain. We believe Lavtrig and our other gods are real, too, though they are quieter in the way they poke the world with their fingers. Whether something larger lies behind all that - well, who can say? But the wicked do not triumph forever. Nothing can make me believe that.”

Then why did the Reds beat Germany?
Hasso wondered.
Why wouldn’t the USA and England see
that Stalin was more dangerous than Hitler ever could be?

Maybe God was out having a few drinks with the Lenello goddess and the Bucovinan gods. That made as much, or as little, sense to Hasso as anything else. He spread his hands. “I have no answers, priestess.”

“You would scare me if you said you did,” Drepteaza said. “You would scare me worse if you made me believe you.” She eyed him. “More than most people, you would make me wonder if you did say something like that.”

“Me? All I’m trying to do here is stay alive,” Hasso said.

“You’ve seen another world. You must have had a god - or maybe gods - of your own there.”

“Ja.
I was just thinking about Him, in fact. He doesn’t answer.”

“Then why are you here now?”

He shrugged. It was a damn good question. But, again ... “I don’t know.” Did the Omphalos have anything to do with the God Who was also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The ancient Greeks wouldn’t have said so. Whether they were right - again, Hasso didn’t know.

Drepteaza didn’t want to leave it alone. “And,” she continued, “you spent all that time with the goddess on earth. If you don’t know more about such things than most people, who does?”

“I know a good bit about Velona - what a lover can know in the time we were together. A lover who has to learn a language first, I mean.” Hasso corrected himself. “About the goddess ... All I know about the goddess is that she frightens me. She’s... bigger than I am.”

“Well, yes,” Drepteaza said. “Of course. That’s what makes her a goddess. Whether she’s big enough to eat Bucovin ... She thinks she is. So far, she’s proved wrong, but she keeps trying.”

Thinking you were bigger than you really were was one of the worst mistakes you could make. Not even Hitler could argue with that, not any more. If you got into a war with the two biggest countries with the two strongest economies in the world - mm, chances were you wouldn’t be happy with the way things turned out. And chances were Hitler wasn’t, if he was still alive.

“Is that all you need to be a god?” Hasso asked. “To be strong?” He hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. Back in his own world, he’d taken for granted the answers other people gave him. He had more trouble doing that here, because he was hearing different things from different people.
Maybe they’re all wrong,
he thought.
But how can I know? How do I make up my mind?
He’d never imagined there could be such a thing as too much freedom, but maybe there was. And Drepteaza looked at him in surprise. “What else is there, Hasso Pemsel?”

Another alarmingly keen question. Hitler and Stalin ruled their countries as virtual gods because they were strong. Some people would say one of them was good and some the other, but who would say they both were? Nobody. Maybe it was true for beings genuinely supernatural, too. Why wouldn’t it be?

One reason occurred to him. “A god should be good, too, yes?” That, to him, needed to count more for real gods than for the self-made variety.

“What
is
good?” Drepteaza asked, and, like Pilate asking about truth, she didn’t wait around for the answer.

Reports about the Lenello raiders came back from the west. They plundered and killed, and then they withdrew. How much Bucovinan harassment had to do with that, Hasso couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell how much good his gunpowder would have done, either.

He took another lover, a woman named Gishte. He didn’t think she was any more excited about him than Leneshul was, but she was more polite about it. That would do - for a while, anyhow. He made damn sure he never took another bath with Drepteaza. It wouldn’t have meant anything to her. That wasn’t the point. It would have meant much too much to him. As things were, he played back memories of her nakedness as if he’d been a frontline
Signal
cameraman filming it on the spot. All sorts of crazy thoughts went through his head. What would happen if he got enough gunpowder to blow up the castle here? Falticeni and Bucovin would never be the same. Of course, he would also blow himself up, and he didn’t want to do that. If he were suicidal, he never would have sat on the Omphalos. He would have fought on till he got killed. It probably wouldn’t have taken long. Rautat made sure he had plenty of beer and mead and even wine. Gishte liked that; she got lit up whenever she saw the chance. That told Hasso some of what she really thought of him, though she didn’t slip even when she was drunk.

“What good does drunk do you?” he asked her one morning before she started drinking hard.

“What good does sober do me?” Gishte returned, a counter-question for which, like so many here, he had no good answer. He did hope she wasn’t drinking because she was going to bed with a Lenello - or somebody who looked like one. When he came right out and asked her about that, she shook her head.

“No, you’re not so bad, and the priestess told me I didn’t have to screw you if I didn’t care to. I just like to get drunk, that’s all.”

What was he supposed to say to that? Plenty of Lenelli liked to get drunk, too - Scanno came to mind. So did plenty of Germans. As for the Russians, the less said about that, the better. It didn’t stop them from beating the snot out of the
Wehrmacht.
Sometimes it even helped. Waiting in the trenches, you’d hear them getting plowed and yelling and shouting and carrying on, and then they’d come at you not caring if they lived or died. An awful lot of them
did
die, which too often didn’t stop the rest from overrunning your position.

He’d seen so many drunken Grenye in Drammen, he’d figured all drunken Grenye drank to avoid comparing themselves to Lenelli. Didn’t Indians do that kind of thing in the United States? Drinking because you liked to get drunk seemed too ... ordinary to fit in with being a native.
Maybe I have to start thinking of them as people,
Hasso thought.
Short, squat, dark, mostly homely
people who don’t look like me.

Gishte wasn’t homely, though she was a long way from gorgeous. He’d bedded gorgeous - he knew about that. The thought of Velona, and of losing Velona, stabbed at him again. Next to Velona, Drepteaza wasn’t gorgeous, either. Well, who was, dammit? Velona turned movie stars plain. With Drepteaza, it didn’t seem to matter so much. That was partly because Drepteaza had one hell of a shape of her own, as Hasso had every reason to know.

And it was partly because Drepteaza was
interesting.
She didn’t have the live-wire aura that Velona wore like a second skin, but who did? She also didn’t go off like nitro-glycerine if she got angry. She was

... good people.

Yeah, she’s good people,
Hasso jeered at himself.
And she doesn’t want thing one to do with you,
not that way, even if you have seen her naked.

“Hey, don’t pour down all of that by yourself,” he told Gishte, and he got drunk, too. Why the hell not?

He couldn’t think of a single reason. Making love with Gishte when they were both smashed was fun, too. He thought so at the time, anyway. And, when you were smashed, you didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything but right then.

The bad news about a bender was, you had to come down from it. Drepteaza eyed Hasso as if he were something the cat was trying to cover up. “Have a good time yesterday?” she asked at breakfast the next morning.

“Gnurf,” he answered, squinting at her through eyes as narrow as he could make them. Wan winter sunlight and torches he usually wouldn’t have tried to read by seemed much too bright today.

“You need something better than porridge,” she said, and spoke in Bucovinan to a serving woman. The woman came back with a bowl of strong-smelling soup.

“What is it?” Hasso asked suspiciously.

“Tripe and spices,” Drepteaza told him. “It takes the edge off things.”

Feeling like a man defusing a bomb, he tried it. But the bomb had already gone off, inside his head. The soup did help calm his sour stomach. He thought the mug of beer he downed with it went further toward reconciling him to being alive. To his own surprise, he did get to the bottom of the bowl of soup.

“Thanks,” he said to Drepteaza in Bucovinan. “Better.”

She looked at him like a
Feldwebel
eyeing a private fresh from the Russian front who’d just painted Paris red ... before Paris fell again. “You’re not going to be worth much the rest of the day, are you?”

She sounded more resigned than critical.

“Sorry.” Hasso was sorry about how he felt - that was for sure.

She startled him with a smile. “It happens,” she said. “You’re a human being, too.”

That was how Hasso turned the word into German in his mind, anyhow. The literal meaning of the Bucovinan was
somebody who speaks our language.
The ancient Greeks had called foreigners
barbaroi
- people who made
bar-bar
noises instead of words that meant something.
Nemtsi,
the Russian name for Germans, meant
tongue-tied ones
or
mutes.
Considering how little Bucovinan Hasso actually spoke, Drepteaza either stretched a point or paid him a considerable compliment. He stood up. He seldom cared to do that around her; it reminded her how different from her folk he was. But right now that was exactly the point. Bowing, he said, “Not a cursed Lenello, eh?”

She bit her lip. Did she turn red? She was too dark and the lighting too gloomy to let Hasso be sure.

“You can’t help the way you look, Hasso Pemsel,” she said. “And I can’t help looking at you and seeing

... what you look like.”

Rumors ran through the
Wehrmacht
that Hitler didn’t trust Field Marshal Manstein because he thought the officer had Jewish blood. Manstein’s impressive sickle of a nose no doubt had a lot to do with those rumors. What was this but more of the same?

Hasso sighed. “You see what you want to see, whether it is there or not.” To make matters worse, he had to say that in Lenello; it was too complicated to let him turn it into Bucovinan.

“Maybe I do. Probably I do, in fact,” Drepteaza said, also in Lenello. “And what do King Bottero and his men see when they look at us? What does Velona see when she looks at us?” Did her voice take on a certain edge when she named the goddess on earth? Hasso thought so. Before he answered, he sat down again. Looming over her if he wasn’t making a point was just plain rude. Besides, his head hurt less when he got off his feet. “You know what they think,” he said uncomfortably. And he’d thought the same thing till he came to Falticeni as a captive. How could he help it?

“Oh, yes. I know.” Drepteaza’s nod was a ripple atop an ocean of hard-restrained bitterness. “I know too well. We are small and swart and ugly. And the Lenelli can work magic and we can’t. To the Lenelli, that turns us into something not much more than beasts. But only a handful of them are wizards. The rest are as mindblind as we are. Does that turn them into beasts, too?”

Scanno had pointed out the same thing. When Hasso stayed in Drammen, he’d never once asked about it. He wondered why not. King Bottero could no more cast a spell than Drepteaza. But Bottero, wizard or not, was tall and fair and blue-eyed. To the Lenelli, that put him several steps up on the natives. Didn’t German propaganda go on and on about Jewish mouths and noses? Didn’t the Aryans of the
Reich
look down their straight noses at Italians because they were small and dark and excitable?

Negroes? The less said about Negroes, the better. The
Führer
hadn’t wanted to shake that colored sprinter and jumper’s hand even after he won all those gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. And, coming back to this world, the Bucovinan priestess was dead right. Most Lenelli
were
as mindblind as her own folk. That didn’t turn them into
Untermenschen
in the eyes of their countrymen. All that talk was ... talk. The Lenelli didn’t like the Grenye because they looked different, they talked different, and they were in the way. Those were all common enough reasons for two folk not to like each other: Germans and Frenchmen sprang to mind. But the mindblindness gave the Lenelli an extra excuse to use the natives any way they pleased.

It all seemed as plain as a punch in the jaw to Hasso, who looked at the way things were here from the outside. Suddenly, out of the blue, he wondered what a Lenello dropped into his world would think of the
Reich’s
racial notions. Would they look as foolish to him as Bottero’s ideas did to Hasso?

He was damned if he could see why not.

Hell, some of those policies looked foolish even to a lot of Germans. If they’d used all the people in the USSR who hated Communism and Stalin instead of jumping on them with both feet and driving them back into the Red fold, they could hardly have done worse on the Eastern Front. And there were times when soldiers didn’t move because trains were busy hauling Jews around behind the lines. If you were going to deal with the Jews like that, wouldn’t after the war have been a better time?

Why didn’t I pay more attention to this while I was there?
Hasso wondered. He hadn’t seen any need to: that was why. Everybody set above him, everybody beside him, and everybody below him seemed to have pretty much the same ideas.

“My God! We threw the stupid war away, and we didn’t even know it!”