Last Orders: The War That Came Early (57 page)

Bit by bit, the country was starting to seem as if it might remember what peace was like. They’d started printing new banknotes and postage stamps without the swastika on them. Old ones still circulated—there
were too many to get rid of them all. But one of these days the hooked cross might go back to being just a decoration.

The Salvation Committee quietly went about dismantling other Nazi excesses, too. Toward the end of a newscast, an announcer said, “It has been decided that the
Reich
Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935, is no longer in effect. Persons whose status changed from citizen to resident under the provisions of that law are restored to full citizenship so long as, in the interim, they have not been convicted of a crime that would entail the loss of that right. All marks of distinction formerly required of such persons, whether on their identity documents or on their daily attire, are abolished from this time forward.”

He went on to talk about something else. Sarah stared at the radio. If she hadn’t been paying attention, she would have had no idea what he’d meant. That might have been part of the idea. He’d gabbled on like a bureaucrat. He hadn’t mentioned Jews once, not in so many words. Plenty of listeners might not have noticed what he said. The
Reich
Citizenship Law of 1935 didn’t matter to them.

It did to Sarah. She ran into the kitchen, where her mother was peeling potatoes. “They’ve canceled the law!” she exclaimed. “We can be people again!”

Hanna Goldman needed a moment to understand what that meant, but only a moment: certainly less time than anyone not a Jew would have. “That’s so good!” she said. “Does that mean we can take the stars off our clothes?”

“It sure does,” Sarah answered. “I want to do it right now and burn them.”

“
I
want to take them off and save them,” her mother said. “If you ever meet someone new and have children of your own, they should see what happened to us.”

Sarah frowned, then nodded. “Well, you’re right. Father would say you have a better sense of history than I do.”

“Father … Did the radio say whether the Jews whose jobs the Nazis stole would get them back again?”

“It didn’t say one way or the other,” Sarah replied. Samuel Goldman wasn’t the only one of those, of course. They ran into the tens of thousands. Professors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, civil servants … 
Sarah wondered how many of them were even still alive. Because he was a wounded veteran of the last war, Father’d had it easier than most, and so had his family. Not easy, never easy, but easier.

Mother’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Chances are that means no. Well, what can you do? We’re all still here, thank God. Even Saul’s here! I wish he’d come back again.”

“He’s not the same as he was—or else he’s more the way he was than ever,” Sarah said. “He doesn’t fit in with us very well any more … except with Father. Father may not get along with him, but he understands him.”

“They’ve both been through the war,” Mother said. “Father used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night once or twice a month. He hardly ever does any more, but he used to. Do you remember?”

“Not really. I never thought about it,” Sarah said.

“You were little. It was just something that happened, and it didn’t worry you. It worried me—I’ll tell you that!” Hanna Goldman said.

“Do you suppose Saul wakes up like that these days?” Sarah asked, adding, “I hope he doesn’t.”

“I hope he doesn’t, too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,” Mother said. “Do you want to grate some horseradish for me?”

“Sure.” Sarah scraped the long, pale root over the grater. Mother didn’t want to talk any more about people she loved waking up screaming, and who could blame her for that? Sarah didn’t even want to think about it. The more she tried not to, though, the more she did.

When Father came home, he was practically hopping up and down, he was so excited. “They’ve decided we’re Germans after all!” he said, and then, “Well, they’ve decided that, since the Nazis said we weren’t and the Nazis were wrong about everything, we have to be. That’s almost as good. It’s good enough! I’m going to burn my yellow stars.”

“I said the same thing,” Sarah told him. “Mother said we should save them so we can show them to the ones who come after us.”

“Did she?” Samuel Goldman’s eyes swung toward his wife. “Did you? That’s a good notion, dear. The things we most want to forget are the ones we most need to remember. Sometimes, anyhow.”

Was that why he’d woken up screaming? Because he couldn’t forget?
It looked that way to Sarah. She didn’t ask him. She didn’t want to make him remember anew. Instead, she said, “You should go over to the university and pay people a call.”

He laughed. “That would scare them, wouldn’t it?” But then his gaze sharpened in a different way. “You know, I just might visit them. I’d like to find out if Friedrich came through in one piece.”

Friedrich Lauterbach had studied under Father. After he got his own academic position, and after Hitler made it impossible for Jews to teach any more, Lauterbach had bought articles from Father and published them under his own name. It was as much as anyone could safely do for a Jew, and far more than most would have done. But then he’d gone into the
Wehrmacht
, so that had dried up.

Of itself, Sarah’s hand fluffed at her hair. Friedrich Lauterbach was reasonably young and reasonably personable. Before he put on
Feldgrau
, he’d as much as said he might have been interested in her if she weren’t a Jewess. She didn’t know that she would have been interested in him that way, but she didn’t know that she wouldn’t have, either. Once upon a time, Germans and Jews had often intermarried, and no one except the Nazis and a few extremely Orthodox Jews got upset about it.

Now? Now Sarah supposed it was legal again. She had no idea what that meant to Friedrich Lauterbach. She also had no idea what it meant to her. Even if he still liked her, even if something sparked inside her when she saw him, would she want to have anything to do with someone who hadn’t gone through the troubles she and her people had known?

By the way Father watched her from under his eyebrows, he was thinking along with her. She had no idea whether any of it meant anything. Lauterbach might lie in a poorly marked grave in Belgium or Russia. Even if he’d come back, he might have found an Aryan sweetheart. And even if he hadn’t, he might not care for her any more. Or she might decide she didn’t care for him.

But she answered, “Yes, that would be good to know.” And so it would. Because if the war had taught her anything, it taught her that you never could tell.

The regiment rode to Kiev in American trucks. Lieutenant Obolensky made a point of telling the men in his company that the trucks were American. Ivan Kuchkov hadn’t known before, but the news didn’t astonish him. These big, blocky, powerful machines sure as hell hadn’t come out of any Soviet factory. They were nothing like the flimsy junk the Nazis used, either. So their being American made good sense.

Of course, had Obolensky told him they came from the men in the moon, that also wouldn’t have astonished him. The way they dominated these rotten Ukrainian roads showed him they were from nowhere close.

Only a couple of men gushed about how wonderful the trucks were. Ivan’s eyes met Sasha Davidov’s for a split second. The guys who were going on about it had never been the sharpest tools in the shed. The lieutenant had tried to warn people, but they didn’t catch on. If you got all excited about how great something foreign was, somebody would be listening. Somebody was always listening. Somebody was always remembering, too.

Banderist bandits fired at the trucks a few times. The drivers fired back. One truck in three sported a pintle-mounted machine gun in the cabin. They wouldn’t be accurate shooting on the move, but they could make a Ukrainian nationalist lie low instead of blasting away with his own weapon.

Kiev swarmed with Red Army soldiers. Some, like Ivan’s regiment, were there to board trains that would eventually link up with the Trans-Siberian Railway and the war at the far end of it, the war against the little yellow monkeys. Others, along with slightly smaller swarms of NKVD men, did their best to keep the bandits from shooting up taverns with PPDs or tossing grenades into movie houses or planting bombs along the train tracks.

In a low voice, Ivan told Davidov, “For once in my life, I hope those Chekist cunts know what the fuck they’re doing.”

“That’d be nice,” the Jew agreed, also in tones that no one else was likely to overhear.

Naturally, there weren’t enough railroad cars. Delaying the buildup of the attack against Japan was unthinkable, unimaginable. The USSR hadn’t fought Japan for several years? What did that have to do with the price of vodka? The authorities made do with their too-small number of cars by cramming more soldiers into each one. If that caused problems for the troops, again, so what? Soviet soldiers were fungible. They always had been. They always would be.

“If they’re going to stuff us together this tight, the least they could do is smear us with oil, the way they do with those little canned fish,” Davidov grumbled.

Ivan leered at him. “How about with fucking bacon grease?” he said.

He didn’t faze Sasha. “If you want to fuck with bacon grease, Comrade Sergeant, that’s your business,” Davidov answered. “Me, I’d sooner get the girl so wet I don’t need any.”

As the soldiers laughed at him, Kuchkov said, “
Yob tvoyu mat
’—with bacon grease, the dry-pussy whore.” But he was laughing, too. Sure as hell, Sasha had scored.

The rich, rolling plains of the Ukraine went drier and browner as the train chugged east. The overcrowded cars started stinking like the
inside of a submarine. The toilet gave up on the second day. After that, it was honey buckets. The men covered them when they could and dumped them when they got the chance. The damn things still reeked. Everybody smoked all the time. The food was worse than at the front, and there was less of it. The vodka ration was smaller, too, because they weren’t in action. That gave everybody something else to complain about.

They clanked past what looked to Ivan like a big granite prick. It had writing on the west side, and also on the east. That didn’t help him, of course. He dug an elbow into Sasha Davidov’s ribs. “What’s it say?” he demanded.

“We’ve just passed from Europe into Asia.”

“Does that mean we’re almost there?”

“Fuck, no!” Sasha said, startled into
mat
. “Not even close.”

“Too goddamn bad. This is a big cocksucking country, y’know? No wonder all the cunts on the borders want to bite chunks off of it.”

“No wonder at all, Comrade Sergeant.”

As usual, the little Jew knew what he was talking about. Pine forests replaced the near-desert outside the windows, and seemed about as endless. When they stopped on a siding at night, Ivan heard wolves howling. He and the men in his section were all scrunched up against one another, trying to find positions comfortable enough for sleep.

After what seemed like forever and was about a week (time blurred in that crush of a car), they came to Irkutsk. Ivan gaped at the vast expanse of water east of the town. “Fuck me in the mouth! Is that the ocean?”

“That’s Lake Baikal, Comrade Sergeant,” Sasha Davidov said.

“Well, shit, how did I know? I’ve never seen the fucking ocean.” Kuchkov chuckled harshly. “Guess I still haven’t.”

Lieutenant Obolensky had been one car farther forward. He stuck his head into the one that tried to house Ivan’s section and said, “Come with me, you guys. This company is getting reassigned to a Guards regiment. That means we did a hell of a good job fighting the Fascists and the bandits.”

Guards regiments, Guards brigades, Guards divisions, were the Red Army’s elite, the upper class in the classless society. They got better
weapons, better uniforms, even better tobacco. Units earned the title with their combat performance. As Obolensky said, winning it was an honor.

Later, Ivan realized he should have heard alarm bells inside his head. But that was later. At the moment, he was as pleased and proud as his company commander. “You heard the lieutenant, you whores!” he shouted. “Stick your dicks back inside your pants, grab your crap, and get moving!”

His legs complained as he stumbled off the train. Fresh air felt like a kiss from a pretty girl. Then, out of nowhere, what seemed like a front’s worth of NKVD men with PPDs surrounded the scratching, yawning, smoking soldiers.

“Hands up!” the Chekists screamed in ragged unison. “You are all under arrest! You are traitors of the
Rodina
!”

They always said that. They meant traitors to the motherland, but it never came out of their mouths that way. Ivan had heard as much from zeks who’d got out of their clutches. Now he heard it for himself. It sounded stupid, all right. No matter how stupid it sounded, though, the bastards finally had him.

He thought about dying bravely, but where was the percentage in that? He put down his PPD and raised his hands. So did the rest of the soldiers. Vitya Ryakhovsky started blubbering. He knew too well what this was about. Ivan did, too. Yes, the NKVD had a long memory. You couldn’t get away with shooting a political officer, even by mistake. If the Nazis and the Ukrainians hadn’t disposed of these men, the Chekists would take care of it themselves.