Bombs Away (50 page)

“Can I show you anything?” asked the shopkeeper, a woman—probably—too old to need to worry about Russian attentions.

“Thank you, no,” Luisa said. “I'm sorry, but I just wanted to get away from those…people.” She didn't know the woman wouldn't report her, so she used a neutral word.

“Oh.” The shopkeeper nodded. “Well, it's not as if you're the first one. They've made me worry about them a couple of times. Me!” She laughed. She knew she was no spring chicken. Lowering her voice, she went on, “The
Führer
was right, you know. They really are
Untermenschen.
”

Didn't she remember anything from the Nazi days about keeping her mouth shut? She'd just put her life in Luisa's hands. “I think I'd better go,” Luisa said. “I want to see what the grocery has left.” She didn't say
I want to see if the grocery has anything left.
Whether this foolish woman did or not, she knew better than to come out with anything so suicidal.

“Auf wiedersehen,”
the shopkeeper said wistfully as Luisa left. She couldn't have got much business even before the Russians came. She was bound to have even less now.

The grocer's was another two and a half blocks along the street. Several more Red Army men passed Luisa as she walked. They were all more or less sober, and none of them bothered her. Maybe her hideous disguise was working. Maybe they just had orders not to fraternize.

No, it couldn't be just that. The first couple of years after the last round of fighting stopped, the Amis had orders like those. Orders or not, they'd done their best to pick up anything in a skirt.

“
Guten Tag, Frau
Hozzel,” the grocer said when she walked in.

“
Guten Tag,
Horst,” Luisa answered.
“Wie geht's?”

He shrugged and waved at the half-empty shelves. “It goes like this, that's how. Whatever I can get, I put out.”

“It's not as bad as it was in '44 or '45,” Luisa said. There'd been nothing on the shelves then. People got by with turnips and cabbages. And older folks, the ones from her parents' generation, claimed even those bad times were nothing next to 1917 and 1918.

She picked up a tin of pickled beets. The label was in German, but it was no brand she'd ever seen before. It was no brand at all, in fact: it said
Canned at State Canning Plant Number Fourteen.
“Where did this come from?” she asked.

“Somewhere in the east,” the grocer answered. “It's not very good, but the Russians want to get rid of them, so I have lots.”

“It's food.” Luisa put three tins in the stringbag. She walked along till she came upon sardines in smaller, flatter tins. Their label said they'd come from State Canning Plant Number Three. “How about these?”

“I won't lie to you. They're pretty bad,” Horst said.

“Well…” Luisa hadn't seen anything like them since the invasion. “How bad is pretty bad?”

“My cat wouldn't touch them—that's how bad,” the grocer told her. “You might want to use them if you're fertilizing a garden in your yard. Otherwise? Not a chance.”

“They're expensive for fertilizer. We'll see.” She put one tin in the stringbag. She chose some potatoes that didn't seem too wretched. Horst's spinach actually looked good. Up and down the aisles, doing the best she could.

When she came to the counter to pay, he took a box out from under it. “Want some of these? I save them for my good customers.” The box held strawberries.

“You bet I do! How much?” She winced when he told her, but nodded.

He wrapped them in brown paper and string so no one could see what they were. She paid him and walked out the door happier than she'd dreamt she would be. Strawberries! Something nice when you didn't expect it made even life under the Russians worth living.

When Marian Staley woke up, all she saw was fog. Sleeping in the Studebaker with Linda always made the windows steam up on the inside. She rolled one of them down and looked out. It was foggy on the outside, too. She couldn't see farther than fifty feet or so. Summer might be only three weeks away, but northern Washington hadn't got the news.

Linda was snoring in the front seat. She was getting over a cold she'd probably picked up from one of the other children in her class. Packs of kids produced swarms of germs. Marian remembered that from her own elementary-school days. When somebody came down with chicken pox or measles or mumps or scarlet fever, pretty soon the whole class—sometimes the whole school—did.

These days, penicillin flattened scarlet fever. The others kept turning up like the bad pennies they were. They were less common than Linda's ordinary cold, but not enough less.

Pretty soon, Marian would have to get Linda up, get her breakfast, and take her back to the infectious world of other children. If she thought about things like that, she wouldn't have to think about the A-bomb crater—and it was exactly that—in her own life.

She'd known going to war was dangerous. You couldn't help knowing that, in an intellectual way. When countries fought wars, some people didn't come home again. You built statues to commemorate them, you felt sorry for their widows and other loved ones, and you thought how lucky you were that such a horrible thing hadn't happened to you.

Only this time it had.

Bill wasn't coming home again. He'd never take them to a Rainiers game again (not that there'd be any Rainiers games for a while, either). He'd never teach Linda how to tie her shoes. He'd never change a flat tire or install new spark plugs with his usual matter-of-fact competence. He'd never turn off the bedroom light, put his face between her legs, and brazenly flutter his tongue right there, oh God
right
there….

Marian shied away from that thought hard, like a skittish horse sidestepping and almost rearing when a piece of paper blew across the path in front of it. She was supposed to miss her dead husband because he'd been a good daddy and a good provider, dammit, not because he'd made her feel things she'd never imagined before the first time he got her girdle down and her panties off.

Well, wasn't she?

She'd been a good girl before she met Bill. Looking back, that felt like a lot of wasted time and wasted fun. It was what they told you to do, though, so you did it—till one day you got so horny, or somebody got you so horny, that you didn't any more. She'd never do that with him again. He'd never do that with her, do it to her….

She puddled up at the same time as she wanted to touch herself. She missed her dead husband almost every conscious moment. She hadn't missed him quite like this before, though. Till she woke up this morning, she'd blotted out all thoughts about that part of their life together.

Why?
she wondered. Making love, especially making love with somebody you really wanted to make love with
you,
was the best thing in the world you could do with your time. You couldn't do it all the time, but didn't that make the times you could all the sweeter?

When she looked down at her wristwatch, she let out a loud, long, this-is-the-world-and-I'm-stuck-with-it sigh. Then she leaned over the back of the front seat and shook her daughter. “Linda? Linda, honey? Time to get up, sweetie. It's a school day.”

“I don't wanna,” Linda muttered, still three-quarters asleep. Kindergarten had gone from exciting, different, new fun to boring routine in nothing flat. Linda was a human being, in other words—still on the small side, but unmistakably one of the tribe.

She eventually did stagger forth from the car. Marian took her to the stinking latrine tent and then to breakfast. The guy behind the counter gave each of them a bowl of cornflakes with reconstituted milk. “Yuck!” Linda said.

“You've got to eat it. So do I,” Marian sad. She had instant coffee with it: a meal without a single natural ingredient anywhere in sight. No, that wasn't true—she did sweeten the coffee with sugar, not saccharine.

“Yuck!” Linda said again, but she emptied her little bowl. She wasn't fussy about food, for which Marian thanked heaven.

Marian had more trouble choking down her own cereal. As far as she was concerned, powdered milk was as much a chemical weapon as poison gas. It was cheap, and it was much easier to transport than whole milk. That made it ideal for feeding people in refugee camps. It tasted horrible? It was even worse than powdered mashed potatoes (a suppertime unfavorite)? So what? As long as the people stuck in refugee camps got fed at all, the government didn't care if they hated everything they ate.

She got Linda to the kindergarten on time. Then, without anybody to look after, she had no idea what to do with herself. Those bad thoughts that watching Linda kept her too busy to notice clamored for attention now. She mooched along with her head down, hardly caring where she was going. If not for her little girl, her gloom might have taken an even darker, more self-destructive turn. What really scared her was that it might anyhow.

“Good morning!”

That was so plainly aimed at her, she had to look up. From the guttural
r,
she already knew it was Fayvl Tabakman. “Hello,” she said to the cobbler.

He studied her with narrowed, worried eyes. “How you are doing?” he asked. His English was quite good, especially since he'd had only a few years speaking it, but perfect it wasn't.

Marian started to say
Fine,
the way you did when anybody asked how you were. Only the note of genuine concern she heard in his voice made her answer honestly instead: “Not so hot, Mr. Tabakman. Not so hot.”

He nodded. “I believe you. It is still very new for you, too new to take it all in. You have no notion how such a thing could have happened to
you.
”

What do you know about it?
The angry thought fell to pieces as soon as it formed. He knew all about it. He'd known for years. His loved ones hadn't died in combat, the way Bill had. They'd been murdered, for no reason at all that anyone sane could find.

“How…How did you get through it without going crazy?” she asked.

“Being at Auschwitz, that was almost a help,” the Jew answered. “I had so much work to do, and I was so busy trying to stay alive my own self, when did I have time to grieve? And I was starving. Everything shuts down then—the feelings, too. So when I was freed and I could start thinking about what happened, time had gone by. Time is a blessing. Every day further away is a blessing.”

“I—suppose so.” It wasn't so much that Marian didn't believe as that she hadn't had enough days go by yet.

“It's true.” He nodded again, and touched the brim of his cloth cap. “Well, I don't trouble you no more.”

“You're not troubling me,” she said quickly. “You know what I'm going through. You know better than I do—you've been through it yourself already.”

“Today, tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, one at a time,” Tabakman said. “It's all you can do. It's all anybody can do. You want somebody to talk to, I can maybe listen.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Not a whole bunch of things to do in this place, you know?”

I'm more interesting than twiddling his thumbs,
Marian thought. But she couldn't stay miffed. She didn't try very hard. Her wound was still fresh and raw. His might have scarred over, but, say what he would, how could it not still fester underneath?

Pain drew pain. Shared pain drew understanding. Or it might, anyhow. She could hope. A little while earlier, she hadn't been able to imagine even so much. You took what you could get, if you could get anything at all.

The mirror in the bathroom of the ground-floor flat Gustav Hozzel was defending hadn't broken. He couldn't guess why not; almost everything else in the place had. But he got his first good look at himself for a couple of weeks.

He looked like an Ami, but that was the uniform's fault. It was filthy and badly worn. So was he. Aside from looking like an American, he looked like hell. His whiskers were at that haven't-shaved-in-five-days stumblebum stage. More of the ones on his chin were coming in white.

His eyes…It wasn't that the bags under them would hold enough to take him to Brazil. That just meant he was desperately short on sleep. No
Frontschwein
ever got enough or, too often, any. The look in them worried him more. They were the eyes of a man who'd seen too much, done too much, and knew he had too much more to see and do.

A lot of
Landsers
on the Eastern Front had had eyes like that from the end of 1943 on. They knew they wouldn't whip the Ivans. And they knew they had to keep fighting anyway. It wasn't despair. Damnation came a lot closer.

No doubt he'd had that look himself in the old days. Now he had it again. He'd been a kid then. He'd seen all the hideous things that could happen, but somehow he'd been sure they would always happen to someone else. He wasn't sure of that any more. He knew too well anything could happen to anybody.

“Surrender!” a Red Army soldier shouted in German. “We'll treat you well if you do!”

All the emergency militiamen in the block of flats burst out laughing. They wouldn't have believed that
Quatsch
in the last war, let alone this one.
“Yob tvoyu mat'!”
one of them shouted back. As some of the Ivans could
Deutsch sprechen,
so a good many Germans had picked up bits of filthy Russian. What other kind was worth learning?

Of course, yelling
Fuck your mother!
at people with guns had a price. The Russians started hosing down the building with four heavy machine guns on the same mount. They hadn't played with that kind of toy the last time. The Germans had; the Americans, too. It made a dandy light flak weapon to chase off low-flying raiders or maybe even shoot them down.