The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (33 page)

“Sir?” Lemp said: a one-word question.

He wondered if the senior man would deign to explain. Rather to his surprise, the rear admiral did: “Things are heating up in the Baltic. The Ivans need their ears pinned back.” He spoke with unveiled contempt. Lemp only nodded. The Baltic’s shallow, narrow waters would be different, all right. But any place where he didn’t need to worry about the Royal Navy sounded goddamn good to him.

ummer in Münster. A lot of the time, it seemed a contradiction in terms. It could be cool or rainy or foggy in July as easily as not. It could be, but it wasn’t always. Not today, for instance. The sun shone down from a blue, blue sky. It was about twenty-five degrees: warm but not hot. You couldn’t ask for more.

A blackbird hopping through the long-unmown park grass fluttered away from Sarah Goldman as she and Isidor Bruck came toward it. He carried a picnic basket. Even when times were hard for everybody and harder for Jews, a baker’s son could come up with enough rolls and such for a Sunday-afternoon lunch.

Other picnicking couples and families dotted the grass. It was so tall, you could hardly see some of them. “If we don’t sit too close to anybody, they won’t notice our stars,” Sarah said.

“How about over there?” Isidor pointed. “It’s by the trees, so we can go into the shade if we start to toast.”

“Do you have to talk about your work all the time?” Sarah teased. They both laughed. She hurried toward the spot he’d suggested. It was a good one, so good she was surprised nobody else had taken it. She
spread out a couple of towels and sat down on one. The grass rustled. It got mowed less often than it had before the war, because most of the gardeners wore
Feldgrau
these days. Something small and green and many-legged jumped onto her knee. She yipped and brushed it away.

Isidor sat down beside her. He opened the basket and took out rolls and ripe plums—where had he come up with those?—and a real treasure: a tin of sardines. Sarah’s eyes widened. Her stomach rumbled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen any, let alone tasted them. A couple of bottles of beer to wash things down, and …

“I’ll explode!” she said. “Did you rob a bank?”

“Two of them,” Isidor answered. She giggled. Every moment where you could forget the big things and enjoy the little ones was a moment won. A hundred meters away, a little blond boy ran beside a yapping dog. He didn’t even know about the big things yet. The little ones were all he had. Sarah envied him.

Even now, the big things intruded. The plane buzzing overhead was a Bf-109. Sarah didn’t need to think to recognize the shape and the engine note. By the way Isidor raised one dark eyebrow, he knew what it was right away, too. Who in Germany wouldn’t, these days? Sarah took another swig and emptied her bottle. She didn’t
have
to think about it, or about anything else that wasn’t right here.

“Is there any more of that beer?” she asked.

“There sure is.” Better than a stage wizard pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Isidor pulled another bottle out of the basket for her. She drank eagerly. Beer helped blur the big things. Isidor produced a fresh bottle for himself, too. By the way he drained it, he didn’t care to see them clearly, either.

They both tensed when a policeman wandered through the park. Sarah didn’t look especially Jewish, but Isidor did. But the man in the black uniform with the swastika armband didn’t even notice them. He ambled away.

Along with the afternoon heat, seeing him prodded them to move over under the shade of the trees. They’d be less noticeable in the shadows—and the grass was even longer there. Most of the picnickers went on basking in the sunshine; they knew it might not last. If their hides were red and tender tomorrow, well, so what?

Isidor put his arm around her. She snuggled against him. The two of them against the world? Not quite—but, although the big things blurred, they didn’t go away. When he kissed her, she responded with a fervor that probably astonished both of them. If the beer couldn’t do it, maybe this would let her forget everything that wasn’t right here, at least for a little while.

They lay back on the blankets, and the world did seem to disappear—in green. Anyone could come up and see them. Anyone could, but no one did. Isidor reached under her skirt. He’d tried that before, but she’d always slapped his hand away. Now … Now she discovered she didn’t want to. Before long, he got where he was going, and gently began to rub.

And, amazingly soon, Sarah got where she was going, too. He was still kissing her when she did, which muffled the noises she made. As she came back to herself, she stared at the boughs swaying in the breeze above her head. It was like what she sometimes did in the dark—like, but altogether different.

“You’re crazy,” she whispered.

“Crazy for you,” Isidor answered, also in a low voice. “This crazy.” He took her hand.

The bulge he set it on was like nothing in her nighttime aloneness. “What do you want me to—?” she asked.

He undid his fly. There it was, in the open between them. If anybody came by now, they wouldn’t get in trouble just for being Jews—although whoever came by would know he was. “Take it and—” he said. Awkwardly, she did. He gasped, but after a minute or two he told her, “It helps if you spit in your hand.” So she did. She didn’t know if it helped her, but it sure seemed to help him. He gasped again, on a different note, and grunted. None of the mess he made got on her clothes, for which she was duly grateful.

She wiped her hand as clean as she could on the grass. She didn’t want to use even an old towel for that. Isidor quickly set himself to rights. She sat up and looked around. No one was rushing toward them—or running off to bring the policeman back. They’d got away with it.

All the same, she said, “I think we’d better go home.”

“Whatever you want,” Isidor said. If she’d told him he was on fire, he would have agreed as readily. He beamed at her. “You’re wonderful—do you know that?”

He thought so because she’d made him happy. She still had a little sticky stuff on her fingers to prove it. Well, he’d made her happy the same way. She hadn’t known ahead of time she would let him do that, but it was way too late to worry about those little details now, wasn’t it? “I think you’re pretty wonderful yourself,” she replied, and while she said it it was true.

As they were walking out of the park, she saw a bench with a sign:
NO JEWS HERE
. Isidor saw it, too. “Who needs a dumb old bench, anyway?” he said. Sarah squeaked. Could everybody see her ears were on fire? But she laughed at the same time, because it wasn’t just scandalous; it was scandalously funny.

The park was closer to the bakery and the flat over it than to her house, but he walked her all the way back anyhow. The picnic basket was lighter now, which helped. He kissed her decorously on the cheek outside her front door. Did his feet touch the ground at all as he went out to the sidewalk?

“Have a good time?” Father asked when she came in. Samuel Goldman was reading a volume of Dio Cassius in the original Greek. She didn’t think anything a Roman historian had written almost two thousand years ago accounted for the grim look on his face. Had Isidor been so obvious that Father guessed what had happened?

“It was very nice,” Sarah said. “But what’s wrong?” If it was going to come out, better to have it come out now than let it fester.

Father’s mind was a million kilometers from what had gone on in the park, and from Dio Cassius as well. “Winston Churchill is dead,” he said heavily. “I heard it on the radio less than an hour ago. He was crossing a street in London, and a Bentley ran him down. The driver is supposed to have been intoxicated.” By the way he said it, he didn’t believe that for a minute.

Sarah had to shift mental gears. “That’s … bad, isn’t it?” she managed.

“It’s about as much worse than bad as you can get,” Father said. “Churchill was the main fellow fighting the alliance against Russia. And to die like that—!” He shook his head. “That’s how Hitler or Mussolini—or
Stalin—gets rid of people. They don’t play politics like that in England. Or they didn’t … till now.” He stared down at the open pages of Dio Cassius. “Except for the Bentley, Septimius Severus might have handled it the same way.”

“Maybe it really was an accident,” Sarah said.

“Oh, yes. Maybe it was.” But Samuel Goldman laughed harshly. “And maybe
Herr
van der Lubbe set the
Reichstag
fire all by himself, too.”

That heated Sarah’s ears again, and not in such a nice way as Isidor had. No one with a pfennig of sense believed the half-witted Dutch Red had torched the German Parliament without plenty of help from the Nazis. But he was the one who’d lost his head for it. And the fire gave the Nazis whatever excuse they needed to go after the Communists inside the
Reich
for all they were worth.

“What do you think will happen in England now?” she asked in a small voice.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you, because what I think and what I hope are so different,” Father answered. After that, there didn’t seem to be much point to saying anything more. Besides, she still needed to wash her hands.

“WAFFENSTILLSTAND!”
the French officer shouted across the lines. Willi Dernen supposed that was what he was shouting, anyhow. He had a horrendous accent. But the word for
truce
wasn’t easy to mistake for any other.

And the
poilus
around here seemed to think the war was over. The Germans had been shouting at them not to shoot, and they mostly hadn’t. Till now, though, they’d kept out of sight so the Germans couldn’t shoot at them. Willi understood that. He hadn’t shown himself, either. Trust a Frenchman? Not likely!

But it looked as if France and England really were going to join the German crusade against Russia. Willi was just glad he’d stayed on this front instead of getting sent east. Army rumor said the Reds might not be very skillful, but they were goddamn mean.

“Friends!” the French officer yelled. He did a little better with
Freunde!
Pointing east, he added, “To hell with the Communists!”

“Dip me in shit,” Corporal Baatz said reverently. “The
Führer
’s gone and done it again.”

Willi would have been happy to do just what Awful Arno suggested. He wasn’t so sure about the other part of what Baatz had to say. “I wonder what kind of deal we cut to make the enemy go for it,” he remarked.

“Know what I hear?” the corporal said.

“No, but you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?” If Willi sounded resigned, it was only because he was.

The corporal nodded, not noticing the resignation. Awful Arno failed to notice all kinds of things. Doing his best to sound important, he said, “I heard Rudolf Hess flew to England all by himself to set up the deal, like.”

“Everybody’s heard that.” Willi rolled his eyes in disgust. “It’s been on the news, for crying out loud.”

“Ja, ja.”
Awful Arno nodded again. “But I
also
heard he put the Englishmen up to finally giving Churchill what he deserved.”

“All right. That’s new, I guess.” Willi hated to admit it, but didn’t see that he had much choice.

“And now he’ll come back a hero, and the
Führer
will pin the fanciest medal in the world on him. The Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, swords, and diamonds.” Baatz sighed. “Can you imagine it? What could be better?”

“I’m not sure he was doing us a favor, you know,” Willi said.

“Huh? What d’you mean?” No, Awful Arno didn’t get it. Willi wasn’t much surprised. Baatz had a great head—for a cabbage.

“The Tommies and the froggies aren’t shooting at us any more, right?” Willi said, trying to see how long the corporal would need to work it out.

“You can see they aren’t,” Baatz answered. “They’re going to join with us against the goddamn Ivans instead.”

Willi made small, soundless clapping motions. “Very good.
Very
good.”

“You can’t talk to me that way, you pigdog.” Awful Arno turned dull red.

He was already pretty dull, all right, as far as Willi was concerned. “Well, then, take a hint,” Willi said. “They’re going to help us fight the
Ivans—you just told me so yourself. That means we’ve got to go fight the fucking Ivans ourselves. Is that what you really want to do?”