Bombs Away (41 page)

“The bestial American aggressors, still slavering to spill the blood of innocent and peace-loving Soviet citizens, have sent their terror bombers over Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don,” Amfiteatrov intoned. “In the latter city, bombs fell on a child-rearing collective. More than a dozen young lives were snuffed out.”

Ihor's first thought was that Kharkov (as a Ukrainian, he thought of it as Kharkiv) and Rostov-on-the-Don had already suffered enough, or more than enough. Both went back and forth between Hitlerite and Soviet forces twice in the last war. He knew not much of Kharkiv was left standing. He'd never been to Rostov-on-the-Don, but he didn't think it would be in tip-top shape, either.

As for the child-rearing collective…Radio Moscow had made those claims before, too. Maybe they were true, maybe not. Ihor wasn't in Kharkiv now. Since he wasn't, how could he know for sure?

He couldn't, and knew he couldn't. He did remember that, in the last war, each side claimed the other made a point of massacring women and children. In the last war, the Nazis had really done it. So had the men of the Red Army, when they'd advanced far enough to get their hands on German women and children. Revenge spiced killing the way caraway seeds spiced pickled cabbage.

In the last war, the Americans hadn't had that kind of reputation. If anything, they were supposed to be softies then, too slow to start the Second Front and too easy on the Fritzes. But they'd been allies then. Now they were the enemy, with Harry Truman playing the role of Hitler.

Roman Amfiteatrov blathered on. Truman had dropped atom bombs—a large number; Ihor didn't know just how many—on the Soviet Union's biggest cities. Even so, the
kolkhoznik
wasn't sure whether they or the Germans had killed more of its people. Hitler hadn't had the weapons Truman used, but no one could deny the force of his will. He kept the Germans fighting for a year and a half after more sensible people would have seen they had no chance.

Ihor consoled himself by remembering all the extra fighting had cost the Hitlerites millions of casualties they wouldn't have taken had they surrendered. The trouble was, it had cost the USSR even more.

He'd heard the Nazis had killed 20,000,000 Soviet citizens. He'd also heard they'd killed 30,000,000. He had no idea which number to believe. He suspected no one else did, either.

He also had no idea how a country that had lost so many people—whichever enormous number came closer to truth—was supposed to pick itself up, dust itself off, and go on about its business. With Hitler's savage regime shattered and prostrate at its feet, the USSR had actually done a decent job.

Now it was at war again. Now somewhere close to the same number of Soviet citizens, men and women who'd lived through the Great Patriotic War, were suddenly gone. So were the cities where they'd dwelt. More still died in the fighting in Germany and Italy.

Could any country that had lost somewhere between one in five and one in three of the people who'd been alive on 21 June 1941 stand on its own two feet here ten years later and still be a country? The USSR was doing it. How the USSR was doing it, Ihor had no idea.

He glanced over at Anya. She was chatting with the
kolkhoz
chairman's wife. She must have said something funny, because Irina Hapochkova laughed till her plump cheeks turned even redder than usual. Anya'd almost gone to Kiev. She'd almost become part of the monstrous, murderous statistics. But she hadn't, and because she hadn't Ihor's life still meant something to him.

Now Amfiteatrov was talking about how foresters and factory hands had smashed production norms all over the Soviet Union. The factory hands labored in places like Irkutsk, which was hard for American bombers to reach, and in towns like Vyazma, which wasn't big enough for the bombers to waste A-bombs on it.

“And finally,” the newsreader said, “on this great day Comrade Stalin, the beloved leader of the people's vanguard of revolutionary socialism, assures Soviet workers and peasants that, despite all the troubles we have had to overcome on the road to true Communism, the world—the entire world—will see it, and sooner than most people expect. The struggle continues. The struggle will be victorious. So the dialectic assures us. Thank you, and good evening.”

“Moo!” Three different people in the common room said the same thing at the same time. Everyone giggled, even though Radio Moscow followed the news with Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the one he wrote in response to the Hitlerites' siege of Leningrad. Normally, you wouldn't want to laugh while that music poured out of the speaker.

Normally…but not this minute. Everyone in the
kolkhoz
lived in the shadow of things more terrible, or at any rate more instantaneously terrible, than Shostakovich had known while penning his great symphony. And when you lived in that shadow, you laughed when you could, to help hold it at bay. Any excuse would do. A newsreader mouthing silly slogans with a silly accent was as much as anyone needed.

Once upon a time, people had believed in the silly slogans. People had died for their sake, they'd believed with such passion. They'd gone to the gulag for them.

In the world of true Communism, there would be no gulags. Ihor chuckled again. That was pretty funny, too.

WHY AM I HERE?
Isztvan Szolovits wondered. The question was worth asking, on any number of levels. What kind of answer you got depended on how you asked it, which was true of most questions. A believing religious person (a dangerous thing to be in the Hungarian People's Republic, but not quite illegal as long as you didn't make a public fuss about it) would say he was here because God had placed him here as part of the divine plan. An existentialist would haughtily declare that such questions had no meaning.

Isztvan knew less than he would have liked about existentialism. The Horthy regime had frowned on such decadent fripperies. So did the Red regime that took its place a couple of years after the war ended. But for those couple of years, Hungary had been Russian-occupied but not yet officially Communist. The new notions from Paris got in and…They were exciting, till suddenly you couldn't mention them any more if you knew what was good for you.

But for Isztvan right now,
Why am I here?
meant
Why am I in a muddy trench in the middle of Germany with the Americans raining artillery down on my head?
In a way, he knew the answer. His own country's secret police would have tortured him or killed him if he hadn't let himself be conscripted. Their Russian overlords would have tortured or killed them had they shirked.

A big one—probably a 155—slammed into the ground ten or twenty meters in front of the trenches. Everything shook. Blast made breathing hard for a moment. A little closer and it could have killed, sometimes without leaving a mark. Fragments screeched overhead. Mud flew into the air and thumped down in the trench.

He cowered in the dugout he'd scraped in the forward wall. He'd shored it up with wood the best way he knew how. If the best way he knew how wasn't good enough, it would collapse on him, and that would be that. A little closer and it might have collapsed anyhow.

In the dugout next to his, a Pole told his rosary beads and gabbled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Isztvan recognized the Latin. He'd studied some. The Pole's pronunciation seemed strange to him, but he wasn't about to say so. He doubted the Polish soldier would have appreciated Latin lessons from a Christ-killing clipcock.

Any Jew who lived in Hungary heard such endearments. Any Jew who lived in Hungary while the Arrow Cross maniacs did Hitler's bidding heard them screamed in his face. Very often, they were some of the last things he ever heard.

The Communists didn't call Jews names like that. Several big shots of the Hungarian People's Republic, including Matyas Rakosi, who ruled the country,
were
Jews—exiles returned from Russia or survivors like Isztvan. They were not, of course, observant Jews or even indifferent Jews like Isztvan. They were ready to go after their own kind, knowing Stalin would come after them if they didn't. They didn't talk about Christ-killers. They talked about rootless cosmopolites instead. It sounded much more scientific. In practice? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Along with the heavy stuff, the Americans were throwing mortars around. Isztvan had quickly learned to hate mortars. You hardly knew the bombs were coming in till they burst, and they could fall straight down into a foxhole or trench.

They could, and this one did. It burst right behind the Pole in the dugout next to Isztvan's. The boom shook him. A fragment of hot metal buried itself in the mud a few centimeters in front of his nose. Another one, smaller, drew a bleeding line across the back of his hand. And one more, smaller still, clinked off his helmet. Like most people who'd seen both, he liked the German model better than its Soviet counterpart. But the Red Army lid did what it was made to do. Nobody's helmet would stop a bullet. Fragments? Yes.

He was so stunned—and so deafened by the near miss—he needed a couple of seconds to hear someone screaming, and a couple of seconds more to realize it was the Pole who'd sheltered in the dugout next to his. Though other bombs were still falling all around, Szolovits scrambled out of his shelter to do what he could for the foreigner who was here in a war no more his than the Hungarian soldier's.

“Oh,” Isztvan said, and then, “Oh, God.” He'd already seen some things he'd be trying to forget for the rest of his life. This was worse than all of them put together.

He didn't want to look. He wanted retroactively not to have looked. It was that bad. It was…he didn't know what it was. He'd never dreamt even iron and explosives fired with bad intent could do—that—to a man.

Worst of all, despite mutilating the Pole as ingeniously as any torturer might have, the mortar bomb hadn't killed him. He wailed and moaned and shrieked and clutched at himself, trying to put himself back together. He wouldn't be in one piece again till the Christian Judgment Day at the earliest.

When the Pole wasn't screaming, he was shouting and crying out in a language Isztvan didn't speak. Some of that was prayer in Latin mixed with Polish. Some was—Isztvan didn't know what it was. But if he'd been torn apart like that, he would have been howling for his mother.

If he'd been torn apart like that, he would have wanted something else, too. He would have given it to a tormented dog smashed by a tram. You could do it
to
a dog, though. With a man, you ought to make sure it was all right first.

Isztvan pulled the bayonet off his belt and held it in front of the Pole's wild blue eyes.
“Willst du?”
he asked.
Do you want me to?
German was the only language the two of them might share.

He didn't know the poor bastard spoke German. Even if the Pole did, he might be too far gone to follow now.

When his gashed mouth opened, more blood dribbled from the corner. But he choked out three clear words:
“Ja. Bitte. Danke.”
He tried to make the sign of the cross, but his right hand wasn't attached any more.

“Ego te absolvo, filii,”
Isztvan said. He wasn't a priest, or even a Christian. He hoped the words would do the Pole a little good anyhow. In all the time since the beginning of the world, few men had been in unction this extreme. Not watching what he did, Isztvan cut the fellow's throat.

The screaming stopped. Szolovits drew a deep breath. He plunged the bayonet into the dirt again and again to get the blood off it. It was a tool with all kinds of uses, though rarely as a spearpoint on the end of a rifle, its nominal purpose. He'd never thought he'd use it for
that,
though.

An unexpected hand on his shoulder made him jerk and start to use it as a fighting knife. No Americans in the trenches, though. It was Sergeant Gergely. “He shut up,” Gergely said. “You shut him up?”

“Uh-huh.” Isztvan nodded miserably.

“Way to go,” the noncom said. “Take care of it for me, too, if I get all ripped up like that.”

“Once was bad enough, and he was a stranger,” Szolovits said.

“You'd do it for a stranger but not for somebody you know?
Lofasz a seggedbe!
” The Magyar curse meant
A horse's cock up your ass!
Hungarians had come into Europe off the steppe, and their language still showed it a thousand years later.

“Are you volunteering, Sergeant?” Isztvan asked. As soon as he spoke, he realized the joke might be too strong. But he was still feeling the horror of what he'd just done, and wanted to exorcise it any way he could. He'd also begun to suspect—though he wasn't sure yet—a human being might lurk somewhere under Gergely's thick, highly polished steel armor.

And the veteran noncom didn't get angry. He let out a harsh chuckle. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. “If that day comes, you'll know. I'll be screaming the way that poor damned Pole was. Am I right? Did you try to shrive him before you put him out of his misery?”

“I didn't think it would do any harm.” Isztvan sounded more sheepish, more embarrassed, than he'd thought he would.

“My guess is, you did him as much good as a priest would've,” the sergeant said. A good Marxist-Leninist was almost bound to say that. But you didn't have to follow the Communist line to feel that way. Anyone who'd been through a couple of wars and listened to too many people die in ugly ways might come to think it was true. More and more, Isztvan was coming to think it was himself.

Boris Gribkov eyed the Tu-4 under camouflage netting at the field outside of Leningrad. “You know, we're lucky no real Americans have looked us over in either one of our planes,” he remarked.

“Why?” Vladimir Zorin asked. “They look as much like B-29s as real B-29s do.”

“But a lot of the real B-29s have naked girls on the nose, to remind the crews what they're fighting for. Not all of them, but a lot,” Gribkov said. “I bet our
maskirovka
guys would have enjoyed their work more if they'd given us one of those.”

“I would've enjoyed it more, too,” the copilot said with a grin. “But I can't see the guys who give the orders telling them to slap one on.”

“Mm, no,” Boris said. The commissars who gave such orders were stiff-necked, strait-laced…. They were prudes, was what they were. They didn't have much fun, and they didn't believe anyone else should, either.

Leonid Tsederbaum said, “Our fighter pilots would sometimes paint a swastika on the nose for every Nazi plane they shot down.”

“That's true,” Boris said. “And some bomber crews would paint a bomb there for each mission they flew.”

“Uh-huh.” Tsederbaum nodded. “So I was thinking—maybe we could paint two cities on the nose of our beast here.”

He owned a formidable deadpan. He sounded so calm, so reasonable, that the pilot started to nod before he really heard what Tsederbaum said. Then he made a horrible face and exclaimed, “Fuck your mother!”

“I love you, too, sir.” Tsederbaum blew him a kiss.

Two cities. The Jew had asked him if he wanted to bomb London or Paris or Rome. He hadn't had to rip the heart out of a metropolis from which a great empire had been ruled for centuries. That was luck, if you liked. He had smaller places on his conscience. Seattle and Bordeaux didn't matter nearly so much to the people who didn't live in them. If you
did
happen to live in a city where an A-bomb went off, you wouldn't be happy afterwards. The best, the only, defense was to be somewhere else when that happened.

And if you were on the other end of the bomb, the only defense was not thinking about what you did in service to your country and to the world proletariat in arms. Gribkov remembered that the
Stalin
hadn't been able to land the crew at Petropavlovsk. He remembered the craters scarring the cityscapes of Moscow and Leningrad. He
was
defending his country.

The Americans who'd bombed Soviet cities were defending their country, too. A few of the Hitlerites who'd got hanged or shot for running death camps had killed more people than those Americans and their Soviet counterparts. A few, but not many.

That wasn't such a good thought to have. Gribkov wished he hadn't had it. Well, that was why they made vodka. One of the things vodka did was blot out thoughts you didn't feel like having. They'd eventually come back, but with Russians and the way they drank
eventually
could take a while.

There were also other ways to blot out those ugly thoughts. Hearing the base air-raid siren could do the trick, for instance. Pilot, copilot, and navigator looked at one another. Then they all started to run.

Maybe from force of habit, the construction crew that ran up this field had dug trenches by the quarters and others alongside the runways. Gribkov, Zorin, and Tsederbaum dashed for a runwayside trench. Tsederbaum was taller and skinnier than his Russian crewmates. He might have broken the Olympic record for the hundred meters. In any race, though, they would have won silver and bronze.

Tsederbaum leaped down into the trench. Gribkov and Zorin followed. They all crouched in the mud, careless of their uniforms. The trenches were there to protect base personnel from bomb fragments and from strafing fighters' machine guns. They'd done that well enough during the Great Patriotic War. They could again—if they were dealing with bomb fragments and bullets.