Bombs Away (37 page)

More men with shelter halves worn as ponchos moved up to the Hungarians' left. Isztvan saw they weren't countrymen of his. Their uniforms were of deeper khaki, and their helmets had a slightly different shape. He guessed they were Russians and forgot about them.

He forgot about them, that is, till Sergeant Gergely burst out laughing. Half the Magyars in earshot sat up straight when that happened. A bear playing the piano might have been more astonishing. On the other hand, it might not.

“What's up, Sergeant?” Somebody had to grab the bear by the ears. Szolovits took care of it for his comrades. Some of them would step up for him one day.

Gergely was laughing so hard, he needed a few seconds to check himself so he could talk instead. “Oh, the company we keep!” he said once words worked. “This stretch of Germany is turning into the slum of the war.” Then he started laughing again.

“What do you mean, Sergeant?” another Magyar asked, military respect and annoyance warring in his voice.

“I mean you're a fucking idiot, Lengyel,” the noncom answered. “Can't you see? No, I guess you can't—no eyeballs. They're pushing up a bunch of Poles alongside us.”

Urk,
Isztvan thought. That could prove nasty all kinds of ways. The Hungarian and Polish People's Republics were fraternal socialist allies against the capitals and imperialist forces opposing them. The governments of both countries would jail or kill anyone mad enough to have any different opinion. But…

Poland was the first country Hitler overran in 1939. Hungary fought on Hitler's side during the war, though Magyar troops hadn't invaded Poland. To say things might be touchy summed them up pretty well.

Isztvan could see other complications, too. Compared to Red Army soldiers, the Poles were as likely to be as underequipped as his own countrymen. That wouldn't be so good when the fighting heated up again. And…“How the devil will we talk with them?” Magyar and Polish had nothing in common.

Well, neither did Magyar and Russian. Gergely found the same solution he would have used when he didn't feel like ignoring Red Army officers. In his fluent German, he yelled, “Hey, you fucking Polack
Arschlochen
! C'mon over here and swap sausages with us!”

“Who're you calling assholes, you stupid, stinking piece of shit?” The Pole who answered didn't sound angry. He just sounded as if that was how he spoke German. Szolovits could understand him, but it wasn't easy. And every word with more than one syllable, he stressed on the next to last.

Some of the Poles did come over to swap food and smokes and booze. Neither they nor the Magyars got the Soviet hundred-gram firewater ration, but neither nation's soldiers had to do without. One of the Poles said, “Kind of fun to pay the Fritzes back for all the shit they dumped on our heads.”

Most of the Magyars looked at one another when they heard that. They didn't have anything in particular against Germans or Germany. Isztvan thought he understood how the Pole felt better than his countrymen did. He was a Hungarian, yes. But he was also, forever and inescapably, a Jew. Even if there were times when he might want to forget that, the Magyars wouldn't let him.

“So does it make you happy to screw the Germans for Stalin's sake?” one of the Hungarians asked, perhaps incautiously.

Their new friends—well, comrades—muttered to themselves in their own language. Not surprisingly, the accent went on the next to last syllable of every word in Polish, too. After a moment, the fellow who'd spoken before said, “Screwing the Germans makes me happy any which way.” His buddies nodded. He went on, “Did you guys enjoy screwing the Russians for Hitler's sake?”

Not even the incautious Magyar felt like answering that. Admitting you enjoyed screwing the Russians could only land you in deep shit, no matter how true it was. Poles didn't love Russians, either; Isztvan knew that. Down through the centuries, the Russians had screwed them as hard as the Germans had. The Germans had done it most recently, though, and this latest screwing was a rough one. That was what the Poles got for living between nations bigger and stronger than they were.

“I still think it's a kick in the head German's the only language we can use to talk to each other,” Sergeant Gergely said.

One of the Poles pointed up toward the clouds, or toward the heavens beyond them. “Somewhere up there, old Franz Joseph is smiling in his muttonchops,” he said.

Until the end of World War I, southern Poland had belonged to Austria-Hungary. Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, had also been King of Hungary. After the war, the victorious Entente stripped Hungary of all the lands it had ruled that didn't actually have Magyars living on them, plus some that did. Wanting to regain that lost territory had helped push Admiral Horthy into Hitler's arms.

“We may have one more language in common,” a Pole said in German. Then he switched to his other choice: “Do any of you know English?”

A couple of Magyars nodded, but only a couple. Szolovits didn't speak the language. He would have liked to; his ignorance felt like a lack. But he'd never had the chance to learn.

Gergely recognized what tongue it was, even if he didn't know it, either. He jerked a thumb toward the west. “You can take it up with the Yanks and the Tommies, if you want.”

“I have cousins in America. They mine coal there,” the Pole said. “We haven't heard from them since the war, but they're still around.” He scowled. “Not like their country got invaded.”

Sweden. Switzerland. Portugal. Spain. Those were the countries on the European mainland that hadn't been invaded during the last war…and Spain had just finished its own civil war when the bigger fight exploded. Even so, Isztvan trotted out his own indifferent German to say, “Now they have A-bombs falling on them instead.”

“So do the Russians. So do we. So do you,” the Pole said. “It's a fucked-up world, is what it is.”

If it weren't a fucked-up world, Magyars and Poles wouldn't have squatted in the German rain, filling space the Red Army couldn't in its fight against the Americans, English, and French. Isztvan got another cigarette going, but the rain put it out in short order. That was fucked up, too.

GUSTAV HOZZEL USED
a hand-held mirror to peer through a broken window in a house on the outskirts of Schwerte. Schwerte itself lay on the eastern outskirts of Dortmund, while Dortmund was at the eastern edge of the Ruhr. The Russians were getting too damn close to the Rhine, in other words.

This bottom floor of the house was fortified, with bricks and rubbish piled up to waist height by the east-facing wall to hold off incoming bullets. Emergency militiamen had knocked out the wall between this house and the next one farther west. They could retreat to that one when they had to.

More emergency militiamen had dug a corridor from the cellar under this house to the one next door. Gustav had been one of them. His back still grumbled. He wasn't so young as he had been the last time he played these house-to-house games. He grimaced. The fee hadn't changed, though.

The Russians, as a matter of fact, were masters at this kind of combat and field fortification. The
Wehrmacht
had learned a lot from them, and paid a monstrous price in blood for the instruction.

That mirror didn't show him any Russians or other pests. Some of the Soviet satellites' forces were in action on this stretch of the front along with their Red Army big brothers. Hitler had used allies like that, too: Hungarians and Romanians and Slovaks. From what Gustav had seen, they were like bread crumbs in a sausage mix. You used them to stretch out the real meat.

They'd fought bravely—sometimes. But bravery wasn't always enough. No matter how brave you were, if you had only rifles and machine guns and the enemy came at you with tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers and heavy artillery, you might slow him down a little but you wouldn't stop him. And sometimes the puppet troops wanted nothing more than to bail out of the fight without getting killed.

Max Bachman chuckled when he said that out loud. “I don't much want to get killed myself,” the printer replied.

“Well, neither do I,” Gustav said. “But I'm still here, same as you are. We haven't bugged out.”

“And does that make us heroes or jerks?” Max asked. Gustav only shrugged; he had no answer. His boss went on, “I was looking at things from a different angle.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Gustav said. Max made a face at him. Hozzel added, “Tell me what your angle is, then. You know how much you want to.”

“Ah, kiss my ass,” Bachman said without heat. “I was just wondering whether we'd run into any Hungarians we knew.”

“Ha! That's funny! It could happen, couldn't it? They hung in there longer than almost anybody else.” Gustav didn't bother mentioning that the Hungarians had hung in for so long because Hitler occupied their country and installed his own pet Magyar Fascists to run things there for him.

That Stalin was their other choice had no doubt kept them compliant, too. They'd had time to see how he treated other countries that yielded to him. Seeing it kept them in the
Führer
's camp. So, instead of surrendering to Stalin, they'd got overrun by him. And now they were Russian cannon fodder, not the German kind.

“The guy who'll probably know some of the Hungarians is Rolf,” Gustav said after a little thought. “He fought there till the end—till the Ivans drove us back toward Vienna.”

Max made a production of opening a ration can. “I still think chow ought to come in tinfoil tubes, not these stupid things,” he muttered. After a couple of bites, he continued, “Rolf's a pretty good soldier—for a
Waffen
-SS puke.”

“There is that,” Gustav said. Rolf lived up to, or down to, the
Wehrmacht
's stereotypes about Himmler's rival service. He was recklessly brave. But he was also inclined to kill anybody on the other side who got in his way. For him, the laws of war were something out of a fag beautician's imagination. The
Wehrmacht
hadn't kept its hands clean on the Eastern Front. Nobody had, on either side. But the
Waffen
-SS hadn't just fought dirty. It had reveled in fighting dirty. That made a difference.

Not quite out of the blue, Max said, “I wonder what Rolf thinks of Israel.”

“Matter of fact, I can answer that one,” Gustav said. “He told me the bomb that blew up the Suez Canal should have gone off a little farther northeast.”

“Ach!”
Max pulled a face. “I never jumped up and down over Jews, but only an idiot would take the Nazi
Quatsch
about them seriously. An idiot or an SS man, I mean, if you can tell the one from the other.”

“Sure.” Gustav nodded. “You couldn't tell those people they were full of crap, not unless you wanted them to bust your balls. But I didn't go out of my way to give Jews grief.”

“Me, neither.” Max's head bobbed up and down, too.

As long as things outside seemed quiet, Gustav also opened a ration can. He shoveled pork and beans into his chowlock. It was nothing he would have eaten had he had a choice; as far as he was concerned, the Americans kept their taste buds in a concentration camp. Even a lousy ration, though, beat the hell out of going hungry.

As he ate, he remembered SS
Einsatzkommandos
leading scared-looking Jews out of a Russian village back in the early days, the days when victory looked sure and soldiering still seemed as if it could be a lark. He didn't know what happened to those Jews, or to others later on. He didn't want to know. It was none of his business.

Had Max seen things like that? He probably had. If he hadn't, he would have been looking away as hard as he could. Not impossible, but it didn't seem to be his style.

They'd hardly got done talking about Rolf before he poked his head up out of the cellar. “Anything going on?” he asked.

Gustav had found falling back into the military life easier than he'd expected. Rolf might never have left it. Gustav had heard that some old sweats went straight from the
Wehrmacht
and the
Waffen
-SS into the French Foreign Legion: one of the few outfits that didn't worry about where its soldiers came from. They really hadn't quit soldiering. Now they fought in meaningless little wars in places like Senegal and Indochina, places that could never matter to anybody in a million years.

“Not much,” Gustav said. Afterwards, he had a hard time making himself believe he hadn't jinxed things. It
was
quiet. Then, without warning, it wasn't any more. A series of descending shrieks in the air made him yell “Down!” even as he threw himself flat.

The heavy shells slammed into the houses in Schwerte. Pieces of the houses started falling down. Gustav scuttled like a crab—arms and legs every which way, belly on the ground—toward a heavy table. He huddled under it. So did Max. They hugged each other, as much to keep from being knocked out of that problematic safety as for friendship and reassurance.

Something slammed into the top floor like a giant's kick. Big chunks of roof crashed down onto the table. Gustav sniffed anxiously for smoke. If the place started burning, he'd have to leave in spite of the barrage. He hoped he didn't shit himself before then. Lying under artillery fire was the worst thing in the world, as far as he was concerned.

After fifteen minutes that seemed like fifteen years, the shelling stopped as suddenly as it had started. He and Max both knew what that meant. “Come on!” they yelled in each other's stunned ears. Untangling themselves, they hurried to the window.

Sure as the devil, men in khaki uniforms and Russian-style helmets not too different from their own were nosing forward. Gustav chopped down one of them with a short burst from his PPSh. Max wounded another. A moment later, the machine gun down the block spat death at the Red Army soldiers. The Russians—or were they satellite troops?—pulled back and hunkered down. They wanted the German soldiers served to them on a silver platter. If the first round of shelling hadn't minced the Germans thoroughly enough, maybe a second would.

Aaron Finch nodded to his niece. “Give Leon dinner in half an hour or so. He'll probably go to bed between eight and eight-thirty. Make sure he's dry before he does. He shouldn't kick up too big a fuss—isn't that right, Leon?”

“No,” Leon said. He'd been doing that a lot lately. He was younger than the books claimed all the no-saying was supposed to start. That made him advanced for his age. This once, Aaron would have liked him better normal.

“I'll handle him,” Olivia Finch declared. She was Aaron's younger brother's daughter, and had just turned thirteen. Marvin lived up in the hills, in a nicer part of town than Aaron did…and one farther from the downtown L.A. bomb. Olivia poked Leon in his belly button. “You'll be a good boy for your Cousin Olivia, won't you?”

“No.” Leon had strong opinions and a limited vocabulary.

“It'll work out, Uncle Aaron,” Olivia said.

“Yup.” He nodded. If he hadn't thought so, he wouldn't have let her babysit. He was forking over half a buck an hour for dinner and a movie with Ruth and—more important—without Leon. He raised his voice: “You ready, dear?”

His wife came into the living room. “I sure am.” Aaron would have been amazed if she weren't. She was one of those people for whom right on time counted as late. She smiled at Olivia. “You look nice.”

“Thanks, Aunt Ruth.” Olivia smiled back. To Aaron, Olivia looked like…his niece, wearing whatever silly clothes thirteen-year-old girls wore this year. If Olivia thought of herself as a budding femme fatale—or, if you wanted to get down to brass tacks, as thirteen going on twenty-eight—that was Marvin's worry, not his.

Ruth, now, Ruth looked nice to him. She wore a sky-blue sweater over a white blouse, with houndstooth wool pants that did nice things to the shape of her waist and hips. Ruth
was
a woman; Olivia just wanted to be one.

“We're going out, Leon,” Ruth said. “Wave bye-bye.”

“No,” Leon answered, but he did. His mouth said whatever it said. Sometimes it hardly seemed connected to the rest of him.

Out they went. Aaron held the Nash's passenger door open so Ruth could get in. Then he went around and hopped in himself. As he started the car, he said, “One of these days, hon, I
am
gonna teach you to drive.”

“Okay,” Ruth replied. He'd been saying the same thing ever since they got to know each other. It hadn't happened yet. As he backed out of the driveway, she added, “I feel funny going out and having a good time when there's that horrible—hole—gouged out of the city just a few miles away.”

“I know what you mean.” Aaron had seen for himself what the bomb had done at much closer range than she had. “But the horrible hole will still be there if you stay home every day for the next two years and let Leon drive you
meshiggeh
. You're entitled to a little fun.”

“Twist my arm.” She held it out so he could. He took his right hand off the wheel to give it a token yank. She let out a theatrical squeal for mercy. “Okay, Buster—you talked me into it.”

Aaron pulled into the parking lot at Bill's Big Burgers. The BBB lot was crowded; quite a few people were out for a good time on a Saturday night. They didn't let the war get them down, either, any more than they could help.

The Bill in question was a plump cartoon-y sculpture. He had amazing fiberglass hair, wore a shirt and shorts checked green and white, and clutched an enormous hamburger in his right fist and an equally enormous malt in his left. Aaron and Ruth rolled their windows all the way down and waited.

They didn't wait long. A carhop also wearing a green-and-white-checked shirt and shorts came up with a large professional smile on her face. Her figure was much nicer than Bill's. “Welcome to BBB,” she said, handing Aaron and Ruth menus. “I'll be back in a minute to take your orders.”

“What are you gonna do?” Ruth asked.

“I was looking at the cheeseburger with onions—”