The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (44 page)

“And here you are with me,” Hans-Ulrich said, running a hand along the smooth, warm length of her. She had a tiny flat a couple of blocks from the tavern where she worked. “Maybe you’re not so different from her after all. Should I watch it if I try to tell you something?”

Not quite an imbecile, but absolutely an idiot. What woman wants to hear she’s like her mother? “You’d better not start,” Sofia replied with a bayonet-sharp edge to her voice. “And I haven’t talked about marrying you, have I?
Gevalt!
”

“Well … no,” Rudel admitted. He hadn’t talked about marrying her, either. You could screw just about anybody, and your superiors wouldn’t care as long as you didn’t come down venereal. He tried to imagine a
Luftwaffe
officer marrying a
Mischling
First Class in wartime.
His superiors would care about
that
. Oh, yes, just a little! What better way to shoot your military career right between the eyes? You’d never see another promotion again. They’d probably take the
Ritterkreuz
away, too.

“All right, then. Don’t be dumber than you can help,” Sofia said, which, at that moment, might have been asking for more than Hans-Ulrich could give.

“How about this, then?” he said, and rolled on top of her. She squeaked with surprise, but not with dismay. He was amazed he could go this often. He was a young, healthy animal in fine physical condition. He had very few limits when it came to horizontal athletics.

Some little while later, after both their hearts stopped thudding so hard, Sofia asked him, “And what do you do when you’re standing up?”

“It’s been too long. I don’t remember,” he answered, deadpan.

“Braggart!” She poked him in the ribs. “You—man, you.” An exquisitely timed pause. “But I repeat myself.”

He did have the mother wit to realize he ought to ask her something personal (and he wasn’t ready for another round [he didn’t think he was, anyhow]). “What do you want to do with yourself?” he said.

“Live through the war,” she said at once. “If I can’t do that, nothing else matters, does it?”

“No,” he said, wishing he’d come out with the question in a different way. His odds of living through the war were … well, not good. Stuka pilots went where things were already hot and made them hotter. That was a good way to win yourself a Knight’s Cross. It wasn’t such a good way to persuade your insurance man to write a fat policy on you.

Most of the time, Hans-Ulrich avoided thinking about that. What combat soldier didn’t? If you started feeling the goose’s footfalls every time it walked over your grave, how were you supposed to do your duty? You couldn’t—it was as simple as that. And so you figured that everything had gone all right the last time, and that meant it would this time, too.

“You’re going to forget me,” Sofia said. “When you remember me, you’re going to be embarrassed you had anything to do with me.” Most women would have started weeping and wailing after they came out with a line like that. Sofia sounded no more excited than she would have if she asked him whether he wanted more coffee.

All the same, Rudel tried to deny everything. “I’ll remember you forever.”

“Oh, cut the crap,” Sofia said. “You’re going to remember me after you’ve got four kids and a blond Aryan wife? Don’t make me laugh. You’ll do your best to pretend nothing in Bialystok ever happened.”

“How do you know I’m not married now?” he asked.

“You’re the kind who’d wear a ring. And even if you didn’t, you’re the kind who’d get upset about cheating on his sweetie back home,” Sofia answered. “It wouldn’t stop you—does it ever stop anybody?—but you’d get upset about it anyway.”

He twisted in the narrow bed so he could face her. The mattress creaked under him. It had been doing a lot more creaking than that lately. The sun was going down; shadows shrouded Sofia’s features. “You don’t much like people, do you?” he said.

She shrugged. The same excellent firm that did her ankles had also sculpted her collarbones. “I am one. What else have I got to like? I’m not one of those jerks who get a dog or a cat and pretend it’s their baby.”

“All right,” he said. He tended to get sloppy over dogs, but not the way she meant. If Sofia were to get a pet, he had the feeling she’d choose a cat instead. Or maybe a viper.

She leaned up on one elbow. Her breasts were small, with broad, dark nipples, almost as if she’d already had a child. Maybe she had; there was a lot he didn’t know about her. When he reached out to touch one, she knocked his hand away. “So,” she said, “what’s it like for a Nazi to fuck a Jew?”

He had no idea how to answer that, so he tried a counterquestion: “What’s it like for a Jew to lay a Nazi?”

“My people already don’t like me because of who my father is,” Sofia replied. “You, though, you’re different. What would your mother say if she found out who I was?”

His mother disapproved of everything that had anything to do with sex. She’d warned him about women before he had any idea what she was talking about. He was sometimes amazed he’d ever been born. His father must have been very persuasive one night—or just too horny to take no for an answer.

“I’m a big boy now,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about that any more.”

“Fine.” Sofia found a new place to stick in the needle: “What would your commanding officer say, then?”

“He teased me about having a girlfriend before I set out for Bialystok,” Rudel answered. “I just hoped he was right.”

She gave him a crooked smile. “What? You weren’t sure you could sweep me off my feet?”

“I don’t think anybody’s ever sure of anything with you,” he answered truthfully.

“I hope not.” Sofia took that as a matter of course—and as a matter of pride. “When people are sure about you, things get boring.”

Hans-Ulrich could imagine the two of them parting a lot of different ways. Heading the list was one—which hardly mattered—clanging the other in the ear with a frying pan. Other filmworthy melodramas also stood high up there. Getting bored with each other lay way down below something like being separated in an attack by flying orangutans.

He could imagine her finding a German protector useful. Poles didn’t love the Jews who made up a tenth of their country’s population. Perhaps because they had so many Jews, no laws restricting them were on the books here. The
Reich
had such laws, of course. Maybe Sofia feared they would come to Poland, too, and hoped a German could help her escape their bite. And maybe she was right in both fear and hope.

That might account for her taking a German into her bed. But what accounted for her taking a
particular
German, one Hans-Ulrich Rudel? He didn’t ask her. He had a fear of his own: that she might tell him the exact and literal truth. Whatever her reasons were, he was glad she had them. Glad and more than glad …

“Again?”
she said as he began to rise to the occasion. “I’m going to have to put some new minerals in your mineral water, I swear I am.” But she didn’t push him away or tell him no. Her arms closed around him, her lips met his, and he wished his furlough could last forever.

LIKE MOST OF
the men in his division, Willi Dernen came from the Breslau
Wehrkreis
—near the Polish border. He knew a handful of Polish
words, most of them foul. Till this campaign, though, he’d never crossed the frontier. He hadn’t even fought in Czechoslovakia; his outfit had guarded the
Reich
’s western border against a French attack that never really materialized. A good thing, too. If the froggies had hit hard, they would have cracked the undermanned German defenses like a man breaking the shell on his breakfast soft-boiled egg.

And now Frenchmen and Tommies would help the
Wehrmacht
smash Stalin’s so-called workers’ paradise. Life—and who was diddling whom at any given moment—could get very strange sometimes.

Minsk, now, wasn’t in Poland. Up until recently, it had been the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Now it was where the Germans reorganized before sending units new to the east up to the fighting front. A lot of Jews and Red officials had fled the place before the Germans and Poles broke in. The Russians and White Russians who remained seemed resigned to the town’s sudden change of overlords. The Poles in the population seemed delighted. They flew Polish flags, white over red, at any excuse or none.

Willi watched German engineers cart away larger than life-sized bronze statues of Lenin and Stalin. That wasn’t just to show the locals that Minsk was under new management. There had to be at least a tonne of bronze in each statue. Germany was chronically short of raw materials. Pretty soon Vladimir and Josef would get shot back at the Ivans.

Even Corporal Baatz laughed when Willi remarked on that. Awful Arno hadn’t been as awful as usual, at least not to Willi. He had to inflict his
Schrechlichkeit
on the replacements who filled out the company, and that took up most of his time and bad temper.

The bulk of the replacements also came from
Wehrkreis
VIII. The
Wehrmacht
tried to keep men from the same part of the country in the same outfit. It helped units hold together, and anything that did that looked good to the men who gave orders. If you’d gone to school with one of the new guys, or maybe with a cousin of his, you’d try harder to keep him in one piece, and he’d do the same for you. That was the idea, anyway.

Unfortunately, the high foreheads who’d come up with the idea had never heard of Arno Baatz. He was doing his best to make sure that all
the replacements, regardless of which
Wehrkreis
they came from, hated his guts. And his best, as Willi had too much reason to know, was pretty goddamn good.

His latest target was a new
Gefreiter
named Adam Pfaff. The fellow was new to the company, that is; a wound badge and a slightly gimpy left leg showed he’d been around the block before. He seemed a good soldier. Normally, even Awful Arno would have had trouble finding something for which he could pick on him.

Normally. But, for reasons of his own, Pfaff had painted his rifle dark gray. The job couldn’t have been neater. But Arno Baatz had never before seen anybody who carried a dark gray rifle. Like any other monkey, he made fun of the unfamiliar without even thinking about whether he ought to. He gaped and pointed and growled, “What the hell are you doing with that stupid thing? You aim to paint polka dots on it next?”

“No, Corporal.” The calm way Pfaff answered made Willi guess he’d got grief from noncoms before. He patted the
Feldgrau
sleeve of his uniform tunic. “They make our clothes this color on account of it’s hard to see. I figured I’d fix my Mauser up to match. It doesn’t do any harm.”

“It looks stupid,” Awful Arno said, by which he meant
It had better not still be gray the next time I see it
.

“It doesn’t do any harm,” Pfaff repeated, by which he meant
Fuck you
.

There were plenty of things Arno Baatz didn’t understand, but he got that, all right. His plump cheeks turned the color of iron in a blacksmith’s forge. “Oh, yeah?” he ground out. “Well, let’s just see what Major Schmitz has to say about that.” He deployed the heavy artillery. Major Heinrich Schmitz commanded not just the company but the whole battalion.

But the barrage failed to obliterate Pfaff. “Fine with me,” he answered easily. “He’s already seen it. He told me he thought it was a pretty good idea.”

“Whaaat?” Baatz stretched the word out to unnatural length. “You expect me to believe that shit? I’m gonna go talk to him right this minute, and if I find out you’re lying—no,
when
I find out you’re
lying—your sorry ass is mine.” Off he stormed, gloating anticipation splashed all over his face.

Pfaff lit a cigarette. “Boy, that was fun,” he said to no one in particular. Then, catching Willi’s eye, he asked, “Is that arselick always that bad?”

“Nah.” Willi shook his head.

“That’s good,” the other
Gefreiter
said. “Must be on the rag or something, huh?”

Willi shook his head again. He hadn’t finished yet. Now he did: “A lot of the time, Awful Arno’s worse.”

“About the third time I’ve heard people call him that,” Pfaff said with a thin chuckle. “Everybody must love him to death.”

“To
death
is right,” Willi answered, rolling his eyes. “He’s not yellow or anything like that, I will say. When the shooting starts, he’s all right to have at your elbow. Any other time … It’s like you said. He’s the biggest asshole left unwiped.”

He wanted to ask Pfaff whether he’d been bullshitting when he told Baatz Major Schmitz had given his
imprimatur
to the gray rifle. But he held his peace. As far as he was concerned, it was everybody in the world against Awful Arno. You didn’t want to let on that you had doubts about someone on your own side. Not only that, but he’d also find out for himself, one way or the other, pretty damn soon.

When Baatz came back about twenty minutes later, he might have had a thunderstorm hanging from his wobbly jowls. He didn’t come up to Adam Pfaff and admit that the new
Gefreiter
told the truth. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, which meant it was as far beyond Baatz’s ken as the mountains on the back side of the moon.

Since the corporal couldn’t take it out on the man who’d made him embarrass himself, he took it out on everybody else. He screamed at Willi, who’d heard him call Pfaff a liar when the replacement wasn’t. Because Willi had heard all that, he endured the
Sturm und Drang
with a smile on his face. That only pissed Awful Arno off worse. He couldn’t stick Willi with extra fatigues: the privilege the pip on Willi’s left sleeve gave him. And so Baatz screamed some more. Anybody who could draw extra duty did. Willi’s smile got wider.

“You have that fat clown’s number, by God,” Pfaff said, nothing but admiration in his voice, when Awful Arno finally went away. “How long have you been stuck under him?”

“Since before the shooting started,” Willi answered mournfully.

“Oh, you poor, miserable son of a bitch,” Pfaff said. Willi nodded; he thought of himself the same way. The other
Gefreiter
went on, “I bet he doesn’t like your rifle, either.”