The War That Came Early: West and East (24 page)

“Warum denn nicht?”
Dieselhorst said. Rudel couldn’t think of any
reason why not. Down roared the Stuka. He picked his target. Muzzle flashes on the ground meant the Tommies were shooting at him, too. They always did that. The dive-bomber’s engine was as well armored as the cockpit. Small-arms fire was unlikely to hurt the plane.

Two 37mm cannon, on the other hand … 
Blam!
The Stuka staggered in the air. He clawed for altitude. “How about it, Albert?”

“You killed another one! Jesus Christ, sir, this is fun!”

Rudel wouldn’t have taken the Lord’s name in vain. Well, he hoped he wouldn’t have. He’d been known to slip in combat … and every now and then when he wasn’t in combat, too. He hoped God would forgive him, although his father’s stern Lutheran deity was longer on retribution than forgiveness.

And Dieselhorst proved right yet again. This was not only easy, it
was
fun. The enemy panzers couldn’t hide, and they were even slower running away from him than he would have been trying to flee a Spitfire. Dive … 
Blam! …
Climb … Dive … 
Blam! …
Climb … Fish in a barrel …

After they’d smashed half a dozen machines, the rear gunner said, “Sir, maybe we’d better get back. If they come after us in the air … Mm, that’s
not
my notion of fun.”

“Mine, either,” Hans-Ulrich admitted. He wanted to keep right on doing what he was doing. No matter what he wanted, pretty soon the Tommies or the French
would
scramble fighters. Best not to stick around till that happened. And he could report that the twin cannon worked—worked even better than he’d hoped they would, in fact.

Colonel Steinbrenner would be pleased. He’d probably be astonished, too. But so what? Hans-Ulrich was more than a little astonished himself. No more climbs and swoops, not now. Whistling in the cockpit, he flew off toward the northeast.

CHURCH BELLS PEALED
in Münster, celebrating the
Admiral Scheer’
s safe return to Kiel. Protestant, Catholic—it made no difference to the authorities. They wanted celebration. What the Nazis wanted, they ordered. What they ordered, they got. So it seemed to Sarah Goldman, anyhow.

The maddening thing was, most of the time the Nazis had little more use for pious Christians than they did for Jews. Believers had loyalties outside of the all-holy State, and the brownshirts and their grim, clever bosses hated that. Most Protestant ministers were so-called German Christians these days: Christians who leaned toward the
Reich
first, and only afterwards toward God. Catholics still looked to the Pope, but Pius was a long way off, the local
Gauleiter
very close.

Equally maddening was that her own family, like most Jews in Munster and throughout Germany, would have celebrated the
Panzerschiff’
s return, too, if only the Nazis had let them. Sarah knew her father would have. In spite of everything, he still insisted he was a German as well as a Jew.

Much good that did him, or any other Jew in the
Reich
. He wore the yellow Star of David on his ever more shabby clothes when he went out to his work gang every morning. He hadn’t said any of the
goyim
in the gang gave him trouble on account of it. Just because he hadn’t said it didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, though. Sarah knew Samuel Goldman kept all kinds of things to himself. She knew she didn’t know all of them. By the very nature of that kind of conundrum, she couldn’t, could she?

Trying not to borrow trouble—she didn’t have enough already?—she helped her mother fix supper. It wasn’t exciting: boiled potatoes and something the label on the package insisted was cheese. If the label hadn’t insisted, Sarah would have guessed it was half-dried library paste. You could eat it. Sarah had, many times. It tasted more like paste than cheese, too. Her mother was a good cook, much better than Sarah was herself. Even Hanna Goldman couldn’t make the nasty ersatz appetizing.

“I think the rations are getting worse,” Sarah said as she cut a potato into quarters so it would boil faster.

“How can you tell?” her mother asked. That kind of tart comeback usually emerged from her father’s mouth. When her mother said such things, the rations really were going to the dogs … except dogs wouldn’t want to eat them, either.

But Sarah went on, “They really are, Mother. Not just for Jews, either. For everybody. Haven’t you heard the
Hausfraus
complaining in the shops?”

Her mother only sniffed. “Some people don’t know when they’re well off.” If that wasn’t bound to be so, Sarah didn’t know what would be.

Her father came in then. He looked exhausted—clearing bomb damage and repairing roads didn’t come easy for a middle-aged professor of ancient history. But he also looked pleased with himself, which didn’t happen every day. With the air of a magician pulling a coin from a spectator’s ear, he reached under his coat and displayed a small package wrapped in stained butcher paper. “Look what I found,” he said. It wasn’t as dramatic as
Ta-da!
, but it would do.

“What is it?” Mother exclaimed. She tore the paper open. At first, Sarah thought it was a chicken. Then she realized it wasn’t. “Oh! A rabbit!” her mother said.

Rabbits weren’t kosher. They were cute, at least when they had their fur on. Sarah cared about none of that. Spit filled her mouth. “Hassenpfeffer!” she said.

“The guy who had it
said
it was a rabbit,” Samuel Goldman said. “It may meow when you stick a fork in it, though. How fussy are you? I ate all kinds of things in the trenches, and times are pretty hard now, too.”

He was still proud of his service in the Kaiser’s army. And the wound he’d got and the Iron Cross he’d won meant the Goldmans had it better than most Jews in Münster—not much better, but a little. Sarah didn’t need long to give him an answer: “Right now, I’d eat it even if I thought it was a rat.”

“Me, too,” her mother said.

“We didn’t eat those,” Father said. “We knew they ate us when they got the chance. Damned fat hateful things.” He shuddered.

It wasn’t hassenpfeffer Sarah’s mother made. She cut up the rabbit and put it into the boiling water with the potatoes. The less fuel they used, the less trouble they would land in. The smell of cooking meat made Sarah even hungrier than she already was. She hadn’t thought she could get hungrier, which only showed how little she knew. When was the last time the Goldmans ate meat? She couldn’t remember. Some sausage earlier in the year, she thought.

“What did you pay for the rabbit?” Mother asked Father.

“Isn’t it a nice day today? Sunshine all day long,” he answered.

She sent him a look, but asked no more inconvenient questions. She did turn to Sarah, saying, “Why don’t you put the shredded cheese in the icebox? As long as we’ve got the rabbit to go with the potatoes, we won’t need it tonight.”

“Sure.” Sarah was glad to do that. The less she had to do with the horrible cheese, the happier she’d be. She would have liked to toss it in the trash instead of putting it in the icebox. But rabbits didn’t fall out of the sky every day.
Too bad!
she thought. If another rabbit didn’t appear tomorrow, they would need the cheese again. Wanting it was another story.

“That was
good,”
Samuel Goldman said when supper was over. From somewhere, he’d got himself a small leather tobacco pouch. He rolled himself a cigarette with casual aplomb. Sarah wondered where the tobacco came from. Right after they’d made Jews wear the yellow star, the Nazis had cut off the tobacco ration for them: one more way to make life unbearable. Was her father reduced to scrounging butts on the sidewalk and in the gutter? The idea was enough to make angry tears sting Sarah’s eyes. Father was the very image of bourgeois dignity. He had to be dying inside whenever he bent to grab a dog-end. That evidently didn’t stop him from doing it, though. Along with the smell, which she didn’t like, all of a sudden Sarah had a new reason for being glad she didn’t use tobacco.

When he’d smoked the handmade cigarette down to a small butt, he carefully unrolled it and put the few remaining shreds back into the pouch. That made Sarah sure he was getting his smokes from anywhere he could. When he noticed her watching him, he shrugged in faint embarrassment. “I have a habit,” he said, as if he were talking about injecting himself with morphine. “I feed it as best I can.”

“All right.” Sarah wasn’t sure whether it was or not. But if smoking meant so much to Father that he would let
goyim
laugh at him for guddling in the gutter, she didn’t know what she could do about it. No, on second thought she did know: she couldn’t do a thing.

Then she forgot about such trivial matters. Who would pound on the door right after supper? Fear lanced through her, because that was a question with an obvious answer. The
Gestapo
would. The
Gestapo
did whatever it pleased.

Someone out on the front porch shouted, “Open up, you stinking Jews, or we’ll make you sorry!”

“Happy day. Something to settle supper,” Samuel Goldman remarked as he got up and limped toward the front of the house.

He came back a moment later with three blackshirts in his wake. One of them pointed a pistol at him. They all leered at Sarah. She didn’t look at them. Her father seemed as calm as if they were graduate students here to discuss a textual problem in Plutarch.

“Where’s your murdering bastard of a son, Jew?” the one with the Luger snarled.

“I don’t know,” Father answered. That was a lie, but everything was fine as long as the Aryans didn’t know it was a lie. Trying to show them how much they did know, he went on, “I’m sure you would have found out if we did. You must be keeping track of our mail and what we say on the telephone.”

“Bet your ass,” the
Gestapo
man said. “But somebody told us he might’ve gone and joined the
Wehrmacht
. Just what the
Reich
needs—a lousy kike lugging a rifle!” He rolled his eyes—blue, naturally—in disgust.

Fear made the unexpected feast churn in Sarah’s belly. If Father felt it, too, he didn’t show it. “You must have heard that Saul and I both tried to join up when the war started. Think what you please, sir, but we would have fought for Germany. I did in the last war, you know.”

That blackshirt looked as if he’d found half a cockroach in his porridge.
“Ja, ja
. You were going to capture Paris all by yourself till they shot you. Damn shame they didn’t blow your brains out.”

“Anyway, this isn’t about that,” one of the other
Gestapo
men added. “Or we don’t think it is. It’s about after he smashed in that Aryan’s head. He’s a dangerous character, your kid.”

Good!
Sarah thought fiercely. She almost screamed it in the secret policeman’s face. That wouldn’t have been so good.

Her father only shrugged. “You know more than I do, I’m afraid. We haven’t heard from Saul since … since it happened.”

“If we ever find out you’re lying—” The
Gestapo
man glowered fearsomely.

“You wait and see what you’ll find out then. You’ll wish you’d blabbed, and you can take that to church.”

Both his friends thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. The one who hadn’t said anything was smoking a pipe. To Sarah, it stank like smoldering garbage. But it kept them from noticing the smell of Samuel Goldman’s cigarette. Sarah didn’t think gathering dog-ends was against the law for Jews. Anything could be against the law, though, if the
Gestapo
decided it was.

“Sir, I am very sorry for what my son did,” Father said. “If the government had let him join the
Wehrmacht
, he would have fought the
Reich
’s foreign foes, as I did in the last war. But you must know I do not know where he is.” A couple of things he didn’t say hung in the air, at least to Sarah. One was
What have
you
done against the
Reich’s
foreign foes?
None of the blackshirts looked old enough to have served under the Kaiser, and they obviously weren’t at the front now. And the other was
If you thought I did know where Saul was, I’d be in Dachau now, and you’d be tearing out my toenails
.

The blackshirts got the second of those; fortunately, not the first. “Yeah, well, we got this report, and we had to check it out,” said the one who did most of the talking.

“Wherever you got it, I think you should put it back,” Samuel Goldman said. “Of all the places where my son might be, I’m sure the army is the least likely.”

“So are we,” the
Gestapo
man with the pipe said, taking it out of his mouth for the first time. He didn’t notice Father hadn’t said Saul
wasn’t
in the
Wehrmacht
—and a good thing, too. He nodded to the other blackshirts. “We’ve done what we needed to do. We found out what we figured we would—diddly-squat. Let’s blow.”

To Sarah’s relief, they blew. Her father’s shoulders slumped. He let out a long, deep sigh. “Do we have any schnapps?” he asked Mother. “I could use a drink.”

“I’ll get you one.” She hurried away.

“You were terrific!” Sarah exclaimed. “You—”

Before she could say anything more, Father shook his head and pointed to a lamp and to a picture on the wall. The Goldmans hadn’t
found any microphones in their house. Just because they hadn’t found them didn’t mean the microphones weren’t there—the
Gestapo
certainly claimed they were. Even if they had found them, what could they have done? Breaking the gadgets would only have convinced the secret police they had something to hide. They did, but convincing the
Gestapo
of it they needed like a hole in the head.

Mother came back with not one but three little glasses of schnapps, carrying them on a brass tray. She set the tray on the table in front of the sofa. Everybody took a glass. Father pointed again to places where listening devices might lurk. Mother nodded. She raised her glass. “To peace!” she said.

“To peace!” Sarah choked a little on the fiery schnapps, but it felt good when it got to her stomach. Not even a Jew could get in trouble for toasting peace … she hoped.