Bombs Away (29 page)

“Come on, you sorry dingleberries,” Sergeant Gergely called. “Like it or not, we're going up to the front. Move forward through the communications trenches.”

Reluctantly, Tibor came out of his foxhole. Like any other young Hungarian man, he recognized communications trenches when he saw them. He was too young to have used them during the last war, though Gergely surely would have. But the nomenclature of trench warfare was second nature to him. Everybody in Hungary had a father or grandfather who'd done his time in the trenches when the Kingdom of Hungary (much larger than the current Hungarian People's Republic) went into World War I along with the rest of the defunct Empire of Austria-Hungary.

Tibor zigzagged along the trench. You didn't dig them in a straight line; that would have invited one bullet or shell fragment to knock down a whole file of men. Even this trench had fewer kinks than a persnickety military engineer would have liked. It was also punctuated here and there by shell craters. Two burnt-out tank carcasses, one Russian, one American, sat no more than fifty meters apart. Tibor wondered whether they'd fired at each other at the same time.

Whether they had or not didn't matter. The fighting around here had been rugged any which way. Those steel hulks said as much. So did the shell holes. And so did the faint but unmistakable death stink in the air. Not all the men who'd died in the past few weeks—or all the pieces of them, anyhow—had gone into the ground the way they would have in a well-ordered world.

Isztvan Szolovits trotted along behind Tibor. Both of them hunched forward to make sure they didn't show themselves above the lip of the trench. “Well, here we go,” the Jew said in a low voice.

“Some fun, huh?” Tibor answered.

“Fun? That's one word, I guess,” Szolovits said. “We've got to be nuts, even trying this.”

Since the same thought had gone through Tibor's mind not long before, he couldn't tell Szolovits he was full of crap. He did say, “If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it.”

“What we ought to do is give up the first chance we get,” Szolovits replied, even more quietly than before—he wanted to make sure no one else heard.

“That's desertion,” Tibor said automatically. “You know what they do to people who try to bug out on them.”

“That's if we don't make it convincing,” Szolovits said. “They're sending us up there to fight. Wouldn't you rather spend the rest of the war in a POW camp than in some scratched-out grave? Do you give a shit for Stalin and our fraternal socialist allies? C'mon!”

“If Gergely hears you, you're dead meat. He'll take care of that personally,” Tibor said.

“If you rat on me, I am. Otherwise? Maybe not,” the Jew returned. “You think Gergely doesn't want to live, too? You think he isn't figuring the angles? He's so crooked, he can look down the crack of his own ass.”

Tibor snorted—not because Szolovits was wrong but because he was right. Anyone who could serve both the Arrow Cross and the Communist Party figured the angles better than a pool shark. If Tibor did rat on his fellow soldier, Szolovits would get it in the neck. And then? Then they'd commend Tibor and send him forward so he could get it in the neck, too. The Americans would give it to him, not his own people, but what difference did that make?

His heart sank when he saw soldiers in the forward trenches: Russians, dammit. A lieutenant came over to Sergeant Gergely and spoke to him in slow, accented German: “Half an hour from now, after artillery, we advance. You understand?”

Tibor hoped the sergeant would do as he'd done farther back, and pretend not to understand the only language a Magyar and a Russian were likely to have in common. But Gergely saluted, nodded, and said,
“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!”
He might have fallen straight out of Franz Joseph's time.

“Gut, gut,”
the young Soviet officer said. “You tell your men, so they know what to do.”

“Jawohl!”
Gergely said, with another precise salute. He did everything but click his heels. Then he spoke in Magyar: “We go in in half an hour, after they shell the Americans. Good luck, boys! Stay as safe as you can.”

The Russian lieutenant sent him a fishy stare. Few who weren't Hungarians learned Magyar. It had no close cousins in Europe. But that lieutenant might have understood more than he let on. Well, even if he did, Sergeant Gergely hadn't said anything to upset him. You weren't going to tell the soldiers you led to go out and get themselves killed as fast as they could.

Freight-train noises in the air, thunder on the ground: big shells flying in to tear at the Americans' lines. From things Sergeant Gergely had said, the Red Army had always been strong in artillery. This wasn't a crush-everything barrage. It was just designed to knock the Americans back on their heels. The infantry would do the hard work.

That Russian junior officer stuck a brass whistle in his mouth and blew a long, shrill blast. He yelled something in his own language and shouted “Forward!” in German for the Magyars' benefit. Then he scrambled out of the trench and ran toward the Americans' holes. His men followed. So did Tibor and his countrymen.

Bullets cracked past him. He clamped down on his bladder and his anus as hard as he could. Not five meters from him, Gyula Pusztai went down with a bubbling wail, clutching at his midsection. The big man thrashed like a cat hit by a car. He was no great brain, but how smart did you need to be to know you were dying in agony?

Tibor yanked the pin from a grenade and chucked it into the foxhole ahead of him. A Yank in there screamed just the way poor Gyula had. Tibor felt terrible. He'd been thinking about giving himself up to the Americans, not killing them.

That didn't mean they weren't still thinking about killing him. Their semiautomatic rifles fired faster than the bolt-action pieces he and his friends carried. A few of the Russians had submachine guns or assault rifles, which put still more rounds in the air, but only a few.

An American popped out from behind a bullet-pocked freezer. What the hell was
that
doing in the middle of a battlefield? Tibor swung his Mosin-Nagant toward the man in olive drab. The American fired first: three bullets, one right after another. Two caught Tibor in the chest. It hurt like hell, but only for a few seconds. Then merciful blackness swept down forever.

“LUNCHTIME, MOMMY!”
Linda said.

Marian Staley wondered how her daughter knew. Tummy Standard Time, she supposed. She didn't have a watch. The Studebaker's clock had quit a couple of months after she and Bill bought the car. She'd never seen an auto clock that wasn't a piece of junk.

Linda didn't know how to tell time anyway. That didn't mean Tummy Standard Time wasn't pretty good. Here and there, people were heading for the refugee camp's mess hall. Maybe that helped give Linda a hint, too.

“Well, we can go,” Marian said. She rolled up the windows and made sure the Studebaker's doors were locked. She didn't have much in there, but she wanted to keep the little she did have. Someone could still break one of the windows and help himself, but that would—or at least might—make someone else notice and raise a ruckus. It hadn't happened yet, for which Marian was duly grateful.

It wasn't raining right this minute, but it was muddy. The stuff pulled at Marian's shoes. She hadn't known a day since they came here when it wasn't muddy. She wished she could go somewhere, anywhere, else. Right at the moment, there didn't seem to be anywhere else to go.

Three sets of stretcher-bearers carried bodies from the hospital tent toward the graveyard. One bunch came from the National Guard. The others were refugees working for their keep or because they were bored out of their skulls. The atom bomb's poison kept on working even six weeks after the damn thing went off. Marian touched her face. She'd healed well enough, and so had Linda.

More and more people bombed out of their homes converged on the big tent that housed the mess hall, like iron filings drawn by a magnet. Here and there, somebody would nod to her. If it was somebody she knew, like Fayvl Tabakman or one of his friends, she would nod back. If it was some man trying his luck with a woman he'd never seen before because he liked the way she looked, she pretended not to see him. She had enough troubles as things were. She needed more like she needed a hole in the head.

When she realized what she'd thought, she smiled. That sounded like something Fayvl would say—as a matter of fact, it was something he
did
say. The cobbler with the number on his arm had rubbed off on her in ways she hadn't even noticed.

Tummy Standard Time must have run a little fast. The line curled around the mess-hall tent, which hadn't opened yet. “Phooey!” Linda said. She enjoyed waiting no more than any other four-year-old.

“Phooey is right,” Marian agreed. “Phooey and pfui!” The two terms of annoyance sounded just about the same. She meant something different by each one, though. Her
phooey
carried the same message as Linda's. She didn't like waiting in line, either. That was one of the reasons she loved the camp so much.

Her
pfui,
now…Another reason she couldn't stand the place was that the people stuck here didn't bathe as often as they should. She and Linda didn't bathe all that often themselves. It wasn't as if the camp had enough hot water. It also wasn't as if you could bathe without hot water in this weather unless you wanted pneumonia or frostbite.

But Marian and her daughter were nowhere near the worst offenders, as she got forcibly reminded every time they had to queue up. Some people either didn't notice they smelled like walking garbage piles or didn't care. Some people, in fact, seemed to glory in their BO. Animals used piss and shit to mark their territories. Some of the stinkers seemed to use their bad smell the same way.

Not so long ago, a camp like this, with thousands of people crowded together and with only the most primitive plumbing arrangements, would have had all kinds of horrible diseases tearing through it. There wasn't much of that. Drinking water carried so much chlorine, it tasted horrible, but it didn't make anyone sick. National Guardsmen with DDT sprayers and Red Cross armbands went through the place once a week. Hardly anyone had lice or fleas. Health workers spread a thin film of oil over every nearby puddle they could find. It was probably still too cold for mosquitoes, but nobody was taking chances. So the inmates might be unhappy, but they weren't unhealthy.

Fayvl Tabakman and his friend Yitzkhak came by. They talked with each other in Yiddish till they saw Marian waving to them. Then they immediately switched to English. “Here—you can wait with us if you want to,” Marian said.

“Thank you, but we should go to the end of the line,” Tabakman said. Yitzkhak nodded. The cobbler went on, “No one likes somebody who jumps his place.”

“Cuts,” Yitzkhak corrected him. “They say ‘cuts in line' in English.”

“You're right. They do.” Fayvl thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to show what an idiot he was.

“In places where there is not enough food to begin with, it may matter more than it does here, where there is usually enough,” Yitzkhak added. “But you make yourself no friends doing it anywhere.” He and Fayvl Tabakman touched forefingers to the brims of their cloth caps, then walked on.

They'd invited Marian and Linda to join them when they were ahead in line. She'd done it without thinking twice. Now she wondered if she should have thought twice. Did people talk about her because she took cuts? She was a mother with a little girl, but even so….

After she and Linda got their ration packs—Linda's was cut down to child-size; the powers that be wouldn't let anybody get away with overeating because of a kid—they saved places at one of the long tables for Fayvl and Yitzkhak. No one grumbled about that; people did it all the time.

Halfway through yet another military ration, Yitzkhak remarked, “I don't like lining up for food, you know? It makes me remember the last time I had to do it.” He also had a number on his arm.

“Food now is better. More of it, too,” Fayvl Tabakman said. “What the little girl has there, that would have fed one of us for a week.”

“Ah, you're stretching things,” Yitzkhak said. “Six days at most.” He smiled to show he was kidding. The smile never reached his eyes. Marian decided he wasn't kidding very much.

“They aren't trying to work us to death here, neither,” Tabakman said. “If they didn't manage that, they just got rid of us, the way we'll get rid of the trash from lunch.”

“How could people do that to other people?” Marian asked.

“I'm the wrong one to answer that,” the cobbler said. “The ones who should answer it are the Nazis. Only now, what's left of the
mamzrim
are on the same side of us.” He screwed up his face as if at a bad smell. Marian decided against asking what
mamzrim
were.

“
Nu,
you're not wrong, but the Russians, they're no bargain, either,” Yitzkhak said. “Lucky me, I was in camps from both sides over there. Such luck! You wound up in one of Stalin's, they wouldn't kill you because you were a Jew. They wouldn't even put you in because you were a Jew. You'd go in because they said you were a reactionary.”

“What's that?” Linda asked.

“Anything they said it was,” Yitzkhak told her. Tabakman nodded. Yitzkhak went on, “And they didn't kill you with poison gas or anything fancy. They just worked you till you dropped or else shot you. Maybe not so bad as the Nazis, but like I say no bargain. And they got Germans on their side, too.
Feh!
” As Fayvl had before him, he mimed smelling something foul.

Marian didn't even know which questions to ask them. Had she known, she wouldn't have had the nerve. She was just an American: someone who'd been comfortable her whole life till the bomb hit Seattle, and who only thought she and her daughter were uncomfortable now. Next to what these two men had known, this camp was a rest cure.

Fayvl Tabakman walked her and Linda back to the Studebaker near the edge of the encampment. When they got close, Marian let out a yelp: “Hey!” Some young punk with pimples and a greasy pompadour was messing with the door on the driver's side. She yelled “Hey!” again, louder and more angrily.

The would-be thief looked up again from what he was doing. He had some kind of pry bar in his hand. Seeing only a woman, a little girl, and a small, skinny man, he let out a yell of his own—a thirteen-letter unendearment—and rushed them, waving the bar.

Marian shoved Linda behind her. Tabakman bent, picked up a rock about the size of a baseball, and let fly. He hadn't played baseball wherever he came from, but he knew how to throw. It caught the kid right in the nose. He started to grab at himself, but fell on his face, out cold, before the motion was well begun.

“Go get a camp cop or a Guardsman,” the cobbler said calmly. “This jerk needs real trouble, or he'll come around bothering you again.”

“Okay.” Marian stared at him. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“With grenades,” he answered, calm still. “Go on, now.” Marian went, herding Linda with her. Tabakman stayed right there, in case the thief came to. Marian didn't think he would.

Konstantin Morozov's new T-54 wasn't new as in coming right off the factory floor. It had already seen hard action. He knew as much as soon as he slid down into the fighting compartment from the hatch atop the cupola. The inside of the tank stank of kerosene.

He'd discovered in the last war why repair crews used that stunt. If a crew got chewed to sausage meat by an armor-piercing round that did its job, you could weld a patch into place on the steel outside. And you could clean up whatever was left of the poor sorry pricks who'd got killed. But blood and bits of flesh would linger no matter how well you cleaned things out. Pretty soon, the fighting compartment would start smelling as if you'd forgotten a kilo of pork in there for a couple of weeks.

So after the repairmen did the best they could with the tank crew's mortal remains, they would swab down the inside of the fighting compartment with a mop soaked in kerosene or gasoline. Konstantin didn't know whether that actually killed the dead-meat stench or just overwhelmed it. Kerosene wasn't what he would have called a pleasant odor. Next to what he could have been smelling in there, it seemed ambrosial.

When he stuck his head out again, the look on his face must have shown what was going through his mind. The corporal at the tank park who'd led him out to the T-54 donned a faintly embarrassed expression. “You've been through the mill a time or two, haven't you, Comrade Sergeant?” he said. “Sorry about that, but we do want to get 'em back into action if we can.”

“Yes, yes,” Morozov said. “Show me where this pussy got it the last time, why don't you?”

That
why don't you?
made the order polite, but an order it remained. The corporal took him to the front of the tank and pointed out to him the rough patch under some new greenish-brown paint. That AP round wouldn't just have penetrated the frontal armor. It would have slammed through the driver and the back of his seat on its way to tearing up the rest of the interior.

Thoughtfully, Morozov said, “I think I'll hang some spare track links or something in front of that. I don't
know
it's a weak spot in the armor, but why take chances?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.” The corporal gave him a sidelong look. “And I like the way you said that—so it wouldn't piss me off if I happened to be a welder. I'm not, but just the same…. ”

“Life is too short when you start quarreling with the guys who're supposed to be on your side,” Konstantin answered. “Doesn't the enemy give us enough grief?” He set his palm on the weld.

“Did your crew get out with you?” the corporal asked.

“We all got out—we took a hit in the engine compartment. My driver was wounded before we made it to cover, though, so I have a new man there.” Morozov resolved not to say anything about the welded spot to Yevgeny Ushakov for a while. The replacement driver was barely eighteen. He'd have enough trouble telling left from right and getting into the proper gear. He didn't need to dwell on what had happened to the man who'd sat in that seat before him.