The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (61 page)

Right now, Ivan and his men crouched in amongst some trees that wanted to be a proper forest but didn’t quite know how. Avram’s eyes flicked across a field to some more trees that might have been an orchard before Stalin started tearing the Ukraine a new asshole
but had plainly stood forgotten ever since. The little Jew didn’t point; the Red Army men’s cover wasn’t all that great.

“
Somebody’s
in there, Comrade Sergeant.” Davidov sounded as spooked as a guy wandering the corridors of a haunted castle in some bad horror film.

“German cunts?” Kuchkov asked. That was his first guess because his officers said there were supposed to be Nazis around here somewhere.
He let them do his thinking for him. He knew he wasn’t real good at it himself.

Unhappily, Avram shook his head. “I
think
they’re Banderists.” He was hardly ever cheerful. Now he looked and sounded even gloomier than usual. Stepan Bandera was the bandit chief in charge of most—not all, but most—of the jerks who wanted to fly the gold-and-blue flag, stamp their stupid trident on everything that
didn’t move, and go around grunting in their almost-Russian language.

“Fuck,” Kuchkov said. “You sure?”

“Two or three of them showed themselves there for a few seconds.” Davidov still didn’t point. He did add what he plainly thought was a clincher: “One of ’em was wearing a cloth cap.”

“Fuck,” Kuchkov repeated. Real soldiers would wear helmets, or
maybe service caps or berets. Only a yokel
off a farm would dress like a yokel off a farm. Ivan went on, “We don’t need this extra fucking shit, you know?”

“Sorry, Comrade Sergeant.” Sasha sounded as if he meant it. He was like anybody else: getting shot or ripped to pieces by artillery fire didn’t appeal to him one hell of a lot. After a moment, he asked, “What shall we do?”

Ivan only grunted. He had no idea how many Ukrainians were
lurking over there. He didn’t want to have to attack them across open ground. If they had a machine gun, or maybe even if they didn’t, they could murder every one of the men who’d come at them.

He grunted again. Then he picked up a branch not quite as long as he was and tied his snow smock to it by the arms: not much of a flag of truce, but he had to hope it would do. “I’ll parley with the bitches,”
he said. “If they don’t turn me loose, or if anything else gets fucked up, send somebody back to regimental artillery and have ’em blast the living shit out of those trees. Got it?”

The Jew nodded. If anybody in this section could be counted on to take care of something like that, he was the guy. Waving the improvised white flag, Ivan started across the field toward the forgotten orchard. It
was a long, slow, lonely walk. They could kill him if they wanted to. No—they wanted to kill him, and they could. It wasn’t the same thing.

After a while, a shout came from the leafless fruit trees: “Hold it right there, you cocksucking Red!”

“Ah, fuck your mother. You haven’t got a cock big enough to suck,” Ivan answered without much rancor. But he did stop.

“You’ve got some nerve, talking
like that out in the open.” The Ukrainian in the orchard made enough of an effort to speak Russian that Kuchkov could follow him well enough. “What do you want?”

“My guys have a radio.” Ivan lied without compunction. “All we have to do is call, and the big guns’ll fuck your position over. If you cunts clear out peaceable-like, we won’t call. I’ll give you half an hour.”

“Why should I believe
a guy who licks Stalin’s balls?” The Ukrainian was almost as foul-mouthed as Kuchkov himself.

“ ’Cause I’m standing here, that’s why,” Kuchkov answered. “You think I’d let you shoot my dick off for nothing better’n bullshit?”

“With a Russian, who the hell knows what you’d be dumb enough to do?” the bandits’ spokesman said darkly. Ivan stood out there in the cold wind. He’d figured he would have
to wait. The bandit couldn’t just give orders, the way a proper sergeant could. He had to talk his buddies into doing shit.

Ivan made as if to look at a watch he wasn’t wearing. “Twenty-eight minutes now,” he called. “Don’t sit there jerking off. Get your nuts in gear.”

He waited some more, occasionally checking that nonexistent wristwatch. After a while, the Ukrainian said, “All right. Keep
your old galoshes on. We’re leaving.” Ivan chuckled.
Old galoshes
was Russian slang—not quite
mat
, but close—for a used rubber. Hearing it made him think the bandit meant what he said.

When Ivan did wave his section forward, only half his men came out of their positions. If that wasn’t Avram’s doing, he would have been amazed. You always wanted somebody in reserve. They occupied the orchard with
no trouble—the bandits really had gone away. Kuchkov swigged vodka and lit a
papiros
to celebrate. A bloodless victory was the best kind.

Chapter 26

L
ike the Goldmans, the Brucks had a radio set. If anything, they listened to it more than Sarah’s mother and father did. Books meant less to them than they did to the Goldmans. Isidor and his folks used the radio to fill in the spaces where the Goldmans would have been reading.

Which would have been all
right, if Dr. Goebbels weren’t the fellow giving the orders about what went out over the airwaves. Oh, not even Hitler’s club-footed propaganda boss could screw up everything. Sarah had no problems with Handel and Bach and Beethoven. They didn’t belong to the Nazis alone. They were part of every halfway cultured person’s baggage.

Wagner … Wagner was more complicated. Sarah had been a girl in
the days back before the
Führer
came to power. She remembered her father playing records of Wagner’s operas then. And, after the direction in which the Nazis were taking Germany grew unmistakably clear, she remembered him smashing those records one by one and throwing the pieces in the trash.

That didn’t mean he, or anyone else in the Third
Reich
, could escape
Wagner altogether. Naturally, Hitler’s
favorite composer was on the radio all the time. Samuel Goldman had usually turned it off or found another station when that happened. Sometimes, though, Sarah had caught him listening, hardly seeming to realize he was doing it. The Germans made it plain that liking Wagner was a big part of being one of them, and her father’d always wanted nothing more than to be, and to be seen to be, a good
German himself.

Besides, some of what Wagner wrote—not all, not to Sarah’s ear, but yes, some—was ravishingly beautiful.

These days, more French treason and French betrayal were on the radio than Wagner. German commentators screamed that France had broken her commitments as an ally and a friend.

David Bruck was nowhere near so sophisticated a man as Samuel Goldman, but did you need to be a
weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing? “It’ll be two fronts going full blast, same as it was in the Great War,” he predicted. “It didn’t work then. What are the odds it will this time?”

“Do you want it to?” Sarah asked him. “If this regime goes down the drain, maybe whatever comes along next won’t blame everything on the Jews.”

The baker looked startled. “I hadn’t even though of
it like that,” he confessed. Turning to his son, he went on, “See what a smart girl you married, Isidor?”

“Oh, yeah?” Isidor said. Sarah was about to throw something at him when he added, “If she’s so smart, how come she married me?” That self-mockery was very much his style. This time, he dragged her into it, too.

“Must be your good looks,” David Bruck said. They all laughed. Isidor looked
a lot like his father. The older Bruck gave his attention back to Sarah. “I hadn’t even thought about no more Nazis. I just remember how hard things were during the last war, and what a horrible mess everything was afterwards.”

The Nazis had sprung from that horrible mess. What might spring from the next one, if there was a next one? Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Hitler’s
party. Sarah was sure of that.

She wondered if her father would be so sure. The Nazis had surprised
him with their virulence. Had they gone as low as people could go? Sarah thought so. If she was wrong, she didn’t want to find out about it.

“Well,” Isidor said, “let’s get these into the ovens.” And into the ovens the dark loaves went. He and his father complained all the time about the horrible
brown coal with the lumps and chunks of worthless shale they had to use for baking these days.

Sarah understood why they complained: they were used to better. Jews all over Germany were used to better all kinds of ways. Here, though, Sarah wasn’t inclined to
kvetch
along with them. Before long, the baking bread would smell wonderful. And the ovens, even if they burned the cheapest, most adulterated
coal around—and what else would a Jewish bakery get?—kept the place warm. In earlier war winters, she’d shivered till spring finally came. No more.

The war bread came out of the ovens right at the top of the hour. David Bruck turned on the radio to catch the news. “It’ll all be lies,” Sarah said.

“Nah.” He shook his head. “Not all. Just most of it.” She nodded; he was right. If you listened
carefully and knew how to read between the lines, you could sometimes glimpse the real moving figures that cast the enormous, blurry shadows the newsreaders talked about.

The latest broadcast started out with a bang: “The Jews are our misfortune!” the announcer shouted, slamming his fist down on a tabletop. “So our beloved
Führer
, Adolf Hitler, said twenty years ago, and, as usual, history has
proved him right.”

At that point, Sarah’s father would have given forth with a derisive snort. Since he wasn’t there, she did it for him. Her husband and father-in-law made identical shushing noises.

“Now the Bolshevik Jews of Moscow conspire with the plutocratic Jews of Paris to try to smash the German
Reich
between them,” the newsreader went on. “For a little while, it seemed the degenerate
French would have will enough to resist the poisoned honey the Jews poured down their throats. Sadly, though, this was not to be. As a result of base French treachery and deceit, we are punishing the enemy soldiers who seek to desert to the Bolsheviks.”

They’d said the same thing after England decided she’d had enough
of the fight in Russia. Maybe it was true. Maybe it was sweet syrup designed
to make the radio audience feel better about what was going on. Here, Sarah couldn’t know for sure without going to Russia herself. There weren’t many places she wanted to be less than in Münster, but the Russian front was one of them.

“Fighting has resumed in France,” the announcer said in portentous tones. “Displaying their usual cowardice, the French were pushed back several kilometers in
the skirmishes. No sign of English troops on the Western Front has yet been detected. As always, England talks a better game than she plays.”

Sarah would have looked across the street at the bombed-out grocery there, only she couldn’t. The bakery’s front window was repaired—after a fashion—with scraps of plywood and cardboard. The RAF played all too good a game.

“In other news relating to the
changed war situation, unlimited U-boat warfare in the North Atlantic has resumed,” the announcer said. “If America’s Jew capitalists think they can get rich shipping arms to increase Europe’s woe, we will hurt them in their pocketbooks. Wait and see how loud they scream!” He laughed a most unpleasant laugh.

After that, home-front reports took over. Then the radio started playing
Tristan und
Isolde
. David Bruck smiled. He liked Wagner. He hadn’t quit liking the composer because the Nazis liked him, too, the way Sarah’s father had. She wondered what that said. Most likely, no more than that he liked Wagner even better than Samuel Goldman did.

Isidor said, “I bet the
Wehrmacht
is jumping up and down with joy because they get to fight a two-front war again.”

“Bet you’re right,” his
father agreed. “They’ve already tried to toss out our beloved
Führer
”—he laced that with sarcasm, not the newsreader’s
schmaltz
—“a couple of times. How long before they take another shot at it?”

Sarah looked from one of them to the other. No, they weren’t sophisticates like her father. But, as she was coming to realize, that didn’t make them dummies, either. They could see what was going on in
the world.

Hitler would be able to see it, too. How far could he trust the
Wehrmacht
? If he didn’t trust it, what would keep the French and English out
of Germany? For that matter, what would keep the Russians out of the
Reich
? There was a thought to make any good National Socialist’s blood run cold!

Sooner or later—probably sooner, the way Isidor grabbed her every chance he could steal—she
was going to have a baby. What kind of world would it grow up in? In a world that didn’t look a whole lot like this one? In a world without Nazis? A few weeks earlier, that would have looked impossible. Now? Now she could hope, anyhow.

“
YOU
CAN
GO HOME AGAIN,
” Vaclav Jezek said, contradicting the title of a new novel he’d never heard of.