Two Fronts (37 page)

Willi didn’t hang around to find out how that particular story wound up. He ran for his foxhole. The Ivans had learned better than to send panzers forward without infantry support (so had the
Wehrmacht
). He couldn’t do much against thirty tonnes of steel with a scope-sighted Mauser. But he could make the luckless ground-pounders who slogged along with the Russian panzers good and miserable.

Horizons and landscapes in Russia seemed ridiculously wide. They did if you’d grown up in the more confined spaces of Western Europe, anyhow. There were the T-34s: tiny as mice at the moment, but getting bigger all the time as they clattered forward. And those little bugs scuttling along between them and behind them, those bugs were the Red Army foot soldiers from the slings and arrows and grenades and Molotov cocktails of outrageous
Landsers
.

They didn’t look like bugs through his scope’s crosshairs. They were men then, by God—men in the almost-Swiss-pattern helmets the Russians stamped out, men carrying rifles that might not be quite so good as his but that were plenty good enough for most murderous purposes. If he didn’t do for them, they would damn well do for him. Even if he did do for some of them, the rest—or those panzers—might finish him all the same.

He fired. One of the Ivans spun and toppled. He was proud of himself. Even with a sniper rifle, he couldn’t hit out past a kilometer every time. Nope, not even close, especially on a moving target. But there was one Red Army man who wouldn’t come any farther forward.

Not far away, a mortar team opened up with their 81mm stovepipe. The Germans had started the war with a smaller, shorter-ranged mortar. Seeing how useful this caliber was to the Red Army made
Wehrmacht
designers imitate it.
Why don’t they do that with the goddamn T-34?
Willi wondered.

The mortar team got lucky. One of their bombs came down right on top of an advancing Russian panzer. The big machine went up in a spectacular display of fireworks. The crew couldn’t have had any idea of what hit them. There were plenty of worse ways to go. Willi’d seen too many of them, and hoped not to meet any of them in person.

He also hoped the explosion would make the other panzer crews think the 88 was here. It could kill them from farther away than they could reach it. No such luck, though. The Ivans came on. Pretty soon, they stopped, but only so they could shell the Germans in front of them. They didn’t shoot especially well, not by German standards. Splinters whistled past Willi. They shot too well to suit him.

Hauled by a half-track, an 88 arrived in the nick of time, like the cavalry in an American Western. The comparison fit, not least because the Germans called their foes Indians. The Ivans fought like savages, that was for sure. Willi didn’t even know the gun was behind him till it blasted two T-34s in quick succession.

The surviving enemy panzers turned their fire on the 88. If they could smash it or kill its crew before it got done murdering them … In that case, this movie wouldn’t have the happy ending the director and the screenwriters should have come up with.

Willi popped up out of his hole like a jack-in-the-box, squeezing off shots at the oncoming Russian foot soldiers. As with his first round, some he was sure he hit. Some who went down might have been diving for cover after bullets cracked close to them. You might not want to miss, but you did when you were short on time to aim.

Up he popped again. He got an Ivan in his sights. And another Ivan got him. A
Stahlhelm
stopped splinters. A rifle round? Not a chance. He knew an instant’s surprise, nothing more. Yes, there were worse ways to go, not that he knew anything about that any more, either.

SARAH HAD GONE
to a lot of trouble remembering to sign her married name. She’d written
Goldman
only a couple of times after Isidor put the ring on her finger.
Bruck
flowed from her pen, at first with a mental discipline her father would have admired and then, as she got used to it, more naturally.

Officially, Bruck she remained. Without Isidor beside her, though, without his parents, without the bakery (and, thanks to the Nazis, without whatever the bakery had been worth), she didn’t feel like a Bruck any more. She was back with her own parents, having nowhere else to go. Didn’t that turn her into a Goldman again?

“If you want to think so, then it does—for you,” her father said when she asked him about it.

“You’ll always be our baby, no matter what you call yourself,” Mother added, which helped and didn’t help at the same time.

Samuel Goldman went on, “Even if you’re Sarah Goldman in your head, you’d better stay Sarah Bruck on paper. If you turn into somebody else, what will happen? Some Party functionary at the
Rathaus
who can’t count to eleven without taking off his shoes will wonder what’s going on. Is a dirty Jew trying to pull a fast one? You don’t need that kind of
tsuris
.”

He dropped the Yiddish word into his professorial German the way he might have used a Greek or Latin
terminus technicus
into a lecture when he was still allowed to teach at the university. He used it for the same reasons he would have trotted out the classical languages, too: because it said something with no precise German equivalent, and to show the world he knew such things.

“More
tsuris
I need like a hole in the head. I’ve got plenty already,” Sarah agreed. Father rarely used Yiddish. He looked down on it—it was the jargon
Ostjuden
spoke. Jews from Eastern Europe, with their beards and caftans and long dresses, had seemed as alien to him on German soil as they did to his Aryan neighbors. He’d hoped their odd look and habits were what fueled the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. He’d hoped … in vain. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews, and that was the long and short of it.

He sighed now, and made a small production out of rolling a cigarette from dog-end tobacco and a scrap of newspaper. It was a big, fat cigarette; his butt-scrounging must have gone well on his shift in the labor gang. The match he scraped alight filled the kitchen with a nasty reek. A moment later, the smoldering newspaper and tobacco filled it with another one. He smiled as he inhaled all the same.

“We’re still here,” he said. “That puts us ahead of a lot of people.”

“Samuel!” Reproach filled Hanna Goldman’s voice.

“What?” Father said. Then he got it. He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sarah. Sorry for what happened, and sorry for reminding you of it like a
shlemiel
.” There was another bit of Yiddish with no exact German equivalent.

“It’s all right,” Sarah answered, which was at least approximately true. “Sometimes it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes … Sometimes it hardly feels like I was married at all. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. It’s one of the reasons I feel like a Goldman again.”

“You weren’t married very long, poor thing,” Mother said gently.

“And wartime marriages can be crazy things,” Father added. “I saw that the last time around. Some of the girls the men I fought with married … Well, the ones who lived fixed things afterwards. Or, a couple of times, they made it work when I didn’t think they had a prayer. You never can tell.” He blew smoke toward the ceiling and left things there.

How
had
he felt about her marrying a baker’s son? However he’d felt, he hadn’t said much. He must have realized he couldn’t do anything to change what she’d decided to do. When you couldn’t change something, keeping your mouth shut about it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

She thought she and Isidor would have been able to work through the rough spots life threw at them. They’d done pretty well in the little while they were together. But life threw more rough spots at Jews in Germany than ordinary married couples faced all over the rest of the world.

Come to that, life threw more rough spots at everyone in Germany than people in most of the world had to worry about: the RAF, for instance. Sarah had hoped the RAF would blow every Nazi in the
Reich
to the moon. When it killed her husband and in-laws instead … What was she supposed to think about it then?

She’d asked herself the same question ever since British bombs fell on the bakery. Now she asked it out loud.

Her father and mother looked at each other. Neither said anything for a little while. At last, Mother said, “They weren’t trying to kill the Brucks. They were trying to kill the Germans who were trying to kill them.”

“I know that,” Sarah replied with a touch of impatience. “If I didn’t, I
would
hate them.”

“During the last war, sometimes our guns would tear up the French farms and the like when we were going after their soldiers,” Father said slowly. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, not after the war got rolling. The farmers … just got in the way.”

“Like the Brucks?”

“Like the Brucks,” he agreed. “If you want to blame somebody, blame the people who started the war, not the ones who got stuck in the middle.”

He didn’t say who he thought had started the war. They still weren’t sure their house wasn’t wired for sound, even if the
Gestapo
had never given any sign it was listening. Sarah could draw her own conclusions. Yes, that Czech, that Jaroslaw Stribny, had assassinated Konrad Henlein. But it wasn’t as if Henlein, the Sudeten German leader, hadn’t been doing his best to tear Czechoslovakia to pieces.

Henlein wouldn’t have done that if it weren’t for Hitler and the German Nazis. He would have gone right on teaching gymnastics in his little provincial town. He probably still would have been a German nationalist. But, before 1933, nationalists had been a minority among Sudeten Germans. And, before 1933, they were a peaceful political movement, one of many peaceful political movements in a democratic country made up of a crazy quilt of different national groups.

After Hitler brought the Nazis to power, all that changed. Hitler heated the fire. Hitler stirred the pot and set it seething. Konrad Henlein paid with his life. Jaroslaw Stribny paid with his, too. The whole world paid with … how many millions of lives?

“
Heil
Hitler!” Sarah whispered.

Her parents looked at each other again. She wanted to clap her hands over her mouth. Neither of them had ever said that, not that she remembered, not even ironically or sarcastically. No, that wasn’t quite true. Father had, in jokes he told. But that felt different from this.

As if reading her mind, Father said, “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. We know what you mean.”

Mother nodded. “Oh, yes.”

Sarah started to cry. She’d done that all the time right after Isidor and his parents got killed, but she hadn’t for a while. Now all the pain flooded back at once. She felt ambushed; she hadn’t believed that could happen to her. Getting taken by surprise only made it worse.

When Mother put an arm around her, Sarah pushed her away and cried harder than ever. “Let her be,” Father said. “She’ll feel better once she gets it out of her system. Sometimes things come to a head, that’s all, and you have to lance them like a big old boil.”

While Sarah wept, she didn’t believe she’d ever feel better. Once she’d cried herself out, she found she did. This was an ordinary rough spot. The next night, the RAF bombed Münster again. Sarah hoped nothing fell on anyone who didn’t deserve it. Too much to hope for, she knew, but she did it anyway.

“YOU KNOW SOMETHING?”
Vaclav Jezek said.

“I know all kinds of things,” Benjamin Halévy answered, which was certainly true enough. “Whether one of them is your something, though”—he shrugged—“that, I don’t know.”

“Right,” Vaclav said. “Y’know, sometimes you’re too fucking cute for your own good.”

“
Jdi do prdele
,” the Jew answered sweetly. “There. Is that plain enough for you?”

It meant something like
Up your ass
. It could be an invitation to fight, but not the way Halévy said it. “Same to you,” Jezek said. “Now where was I going before you derailed my train of thought? I can’t remember.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Halévy said.

This time, Vaclav came out with, “
Jdi do prdele
.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got it. Going on leave sucks—sucks hard.”

“We’re in the army,” Halévy pointed out, “or as much of an army as the Republic’s got—and that didn’t go to France. Everything sucks. That’s how armies are supposed to work.”

He almost always said interesting things. That one might keep Vaclav thinking for days. But it wasn’t what the Czech sniper wanted to talk about. “Going on leave sucks,” he repeated stubbornly. “When we get back to Madrid, all we can do is drink like pigs and screw whores.”

“What else would you want to do when you’re on leave?” Halévy asked reasonably. “What else is there?”

But Vaclav had an answer for him: “I want to go back to Prague, God damn it to hell. I want to see my family. Christ, I want to see if I’ve still got a family. I want to talk Czech with somebody besides this bunch of jerks.”

He waited. If Halévy laughed at him, he really might feel like brawling. But the corners of the Jew’s mouth turned down. “Oh, you poor bastard. You poor, sorry bastard,” he said, more sympathetically than Jezek would have imagined he could. “I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like you’ve got it bad.”

“ ’Fraid so,” Vaclav admitted. “I’ve been away too goddamn long. I’ve almost got my cock shot off too goddamn many times. And for years now the Nazis have been fucking the shit out of my country.”

It wasn’t Halévy’s country, or not exactly: not so much because Halévy’s parents were Jews, but because he’d been born in Paris. He spoke perfect Czech. He’d stayed with the government-in-exile’s forces when he could have bailed out of the war altogether. He might even have had better reasons to hate the Nazis than Vaclav did, and that wasn’t easy. But Czechoslovakia itself didn’t have the same hold on him as it did for the other men in this muddy stretch of entrenchments.

He sighed now. His breath smoked. Winter could get very respectably cold on the plateaus of central Spain. “I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t buy a ticket at the train station and just go,” he said.