The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (50 page)

ome of the Russian prisoners at the camp south of Harbin were quick to learn bits of Japanese. They spoke without much grammar, but they made themselves understood. One skinny, hairy fellow bowed to get Hideki Fujita’s attention—they learned Japanese customs, too—and said, “Peace now Russia, Japan—yes, Sergeant-
san
?”

“Hai,”
Fujita agreed. He couldn’t very well deny it, not when the peace had at last been officially announced.

“We go home?” the
maruta
asked.

To that, the Japanese sergeant only shrugged. “I have no orders one way or the other,” he answered. It was harder to think of the prisoners as logs when they became talking logs: not impossible, but harder.

“So sorry—don’t understand,” this Russian said.

“No orders,” Fujita repeated. They might be talking logs now, but no, they didn’t talk well. You had to keep things as simple as you could, as if you were talking to a retarded three-year-old.

The
maruta
got it this time.
“Arigato,”
he said. “When orders? Soon?”

Fujita shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said again, and walked away. He didn’t expect the orders the Russian wanted to come quickly, but he could see that admitting as much would only cause trouble. The Soviet government seemed to care about the men Japan had captured almost as little as the imperial government would have worried about Japanese prisoners. These Russians had lost Vladivostok, and so they were in disgrace.

It made perfect sense to Fujita. It made much more sense than most of the things the Russians did. It was, in fact, a very Japanese attitude. And if the Russians didn’t care what happened to their prisoners, how could anyone expect Japan to care? Simple: nobody could. And nobody did. The prisoners became
maruta
, became logs, and whatever happened to them was their hard luck.

Muttering, Fujita rubbed his arm and his backside. He’d had more shots since coming to Pingfan than ever in his life before. So it seemed now, anyhow. He was inoculated against everything from smallpox (they’d poked him again, even though he’d been vaccinated not too long before) to housemaid’s knee. Again, so it seemed to him.

But there were no inoculations against some of the diseases they used here. If you came down with the plague, odds were you would die. He’d never seen people so nervous about fleas as they were at this place. If you found one on yourself, you had to catch it and kill it and give it to one of the people from the inner compound so he could examine its guts under the microscope or whatever the devil they did in there.

Another
maruta
said, “Food? More food?”

That, Fujita could and did ignore. The prisoners got as much food as the officers in charge of such things said they should. He had nothing to do with it either way. If the officers wanted them plump and healthy, plump and healthy they would be. It happened. Sometimes the scientists needed to see what germs did to people who had nothing wrong with them but a particular disease. More often, though, the POWs went hungry, as POWs deserved to do.

“Why treat us like this?” yet another Russian asked. “Us people, too. What we do to you?”

How many Red Army soldiers had tried to kill Fujita? More than he could count—he was sure of that. But it wasn’t the point. Japan would have treated—did treat—Chinese prisoners the same way. And she
would have treated other Japanese who surrendered to their enemies the same way, too. Thousands of years of history proved that, too. Soldiers who gave up
weren’t
people any more, not in the eyes of their captors they weren’t.

Could he explain that to a blond
gaijin
with shaggy cheeks? He not only couldn’t, he didn’t feel like wasting his time trying. He grudged the Russian two words: “You lost.” He felt the man’s pale eyes boring into him as he walked away, but so what? Those eyes only further separated the prisoner from him. They should have belonged to a cat, not to a human being.

A few days later, some of the white-coated men from the inner sanctum came forth. They needed fifty Russians to test something or other they’d developed. And, of course, they needed guards to make sure none of the Russians got unruly or got away. A lieutenant, a sergeant, ten ordinary soldiers … Fujita was the sergeant.

“What do we do, sir?” he asked the lieutenant—a chunky man named Ozawa—who’d been at Pingfan when he got there.

“Whatever the scientists tell us to do, we do that,” Ozawa answered. “They’re the ones who run this place. We’re here to make sure that whatever they need to have happen, happens. Got it?”

“Hai,”
Fujita said quickly. He’d already figured out that much for himself. He was hoping the officer would tell him more. But if not, not. As long as a sergeant followed orders, he couldn’t go too far wrong.

They let Fujita choose the soldiers who would come along to keep an eye on the Russians. One of the first men he grabbed was Superior Private Shinjiro Hayashi. “Yes, Sergeant-
san
, I’ll do it,” Hayashi said, as he had to. If he was pleased about the assignment, his face didn’t show it. Neither did his voice.

Fujita could have just whacked him in the side of the head and told him to do his job. But they’d served together for a long time. To his own surprise, the sergeant found himself explaining why he’d chosen the junior man: “I need you. You’ve got good sense.”

That was part of it, but not all. He needed Hayashi’s education, too, because he came off a farm himself. But there were things you could say and things you couldn’t. He said as much as he could. If Hayashi was so goddamn smart, he could figure out the rest for himself.

He nodded now, accepting if still less than thrilled. “All right, Sergeant-
san
. We’ll see what happens.”

Trucks growled up to haul the Russians, the guards, and the bacteriologists away from Pingfan. A rail spur … Motor transport laid on whenever they needed it … The people who ran things here had it good. They had it better than most of the ordinary units in the Kwantung Army, that was for sure. Fujita thought about all the shoe leather he’d gone through because nobody could be bothered with sending out a truck to pick him up.

Well, he was riding now, north through Harbin and then into the forests beyond the city. One of the things that had always struck him about Manchukuo was all the space here. To someone who came from crowded Japan, it was especially noticeable. These were woods where no one had ever logged. They might have stood here, untouched, since the beginning of time.

Or so he thought till the trucks stopped in a clearing gouged out of the woods a couple of hundred kilometers north and east of Harbin: not far from what had been the Siberian border, in other words. Wind whistled cold through the trees. Fujita had unhappy memories of fighting in country like this. So, no doubt, did Hayashi, and several other common soldiers. For all he knew, so did the Red Army men. Winter was on the way, all right.

The bacteriologists had memories of their own. They’d used this place before. Poles had been driven into the ground in rough circles around a central open space. One of the white-coated men spoke to Lieutenant Ozawa, who nodded and relayed orders to the other ranks: “We tie a Russian to each pole, facing toward the middle there.”

“Yes, sir,” Fujita said. He didn’t have to do the tying himself. He just supervised: the advantage of being a sergeant. One of the
maruta
tried to run away. A soldier shot him in the back, then walked over and bayoneted him. The men in white coats scribbled in their notebooks: they would be working with forty-nine, not fifty.

They set up something that looked like a bomb casing made of pottery in the central open area. Then they put on gauze masks and handed one to each of the soldiers. At their orders, all the Japanese retreated to
the edge of the woods. The scientists got behind trees. So did the soldiers, a beat or two later.

The bomb, or whatever it was, went off. It sounded louder than a hand grenade, softer than a bursting shell. “Now we take the prisoners back and await developments,” one of the bacteriologists said. No one asked him what the developments would be. He did condescend to add, “You would be wise to leave your masks on. Yes—very wise.”

Some of the Russian prisoners were wounded by flying pottery—mostly the ones close to the burst. The others didn’t seem to have been harmed. The soldiers herded them all into the trucks again. They rolled south, back toward Pingfan.

They got there in the middle of the night. The prisoners went into the walled-off compound instead of back to the pens. “They won’t come out of there—not alive, they won’t,” Senior Private Hayashi said in a low voice.

Sergeant Fujita nodded—the other man was bound to be right. “Well, who’ll miss ’em?” Fujita said, and Hayashi’s head went up and down in turn.

AS LONG AS THE WAR
dragged on, Sarah Goldman was positive things wouldn’t get any better for Germany’s Jews. Rather more to the point, she was positive things wouldn’t get any better for her or her family. And she was positive she would start screaming about that any minute now.

Of course, she’d been positive of the same thing ever since the war started. Two years ago! Was that really possible? It was, however much she wished it weren’t: not only possible but true.

She nodded to remind herself that the war had been going on for so long. Neither the radio nor the newspapers mentioned the anniversary. When she did remark on that, her father said, “The powers that be don’t want you to remember, because then they’ll also remember the fighting hasn’t all gone the way some people promised it would.”

Samuel Goldman chose his words with care. Sarah feared he wasn’t careful enough, not if the
Gestapo
really was monitoring what they said in the house. There’d never been any proof of that, not in all
the time since Saul killed his labor-gang boss, but the worry never went away.

Hanna Goldman’s view of things was less political and more pragmatic: “Ever since we really started banging heads with the Russians, rations have gone to the devil. They were bad before, but they’re a lot worse now. When they start taking coupons for potatoes and turnips …”

“Did they do that even in the last war?” Father asked. “I was at the front, and there was usually enough there. It wasn’t very good, but we got fed. And we took everything we could from the countryside. I’m sure some of the bunnies we stewed meowed, but we weren’t fussy.”

He’d brought home a rabbit from somebody in his work gang the year before. He’d hoped it was a rabbit then, anyhow. No matter what it was, he’d eaten it without a qualm. So had Sarah and her mother. Sarah’s mouth filled with spit as she remembered the rich, meaty taste. She hadn’t got to enjoy it much since.

“What happened to that fellow who sold you one here?” she asked. “Could you get more from him?”

“Gregor?” Regretfully, Father shook his head. “He disappeared not too long after I bought the last one. Well, maybe he disappeared and maybe he
was
disappeared, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t tell you whether he’s on the lam or in a camp.”

“I hope …” Sarah paused and thought before she spoke. “I hope he’s in a camp, getting what he deserves.”

If some bored
Gestapo
technician did chance to be listening in on her right now, he was probably fighting nausea. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying one thing while more obviously meaning the other. Father’s eyes twinkled.
“Aber natürlich,”
he said. “So do I. So does any right-thinking person.”

“That’s the truth,” Mother chimed in. They beamed at one another in companionable hypocrisy.

To Sarah’s amazement, a few days later Father brought home not a rabbit but half a dozen dressed pigeons wrapped in bloody newspaper. He had to hold one arm pressed against his jacket to keep them from falling out. Together with the limp from his war wound, that made him seem more crippled than he was.

“Where did you get them?” Mother exclaimed when he set the prize package on the kitchen counter.

“You’d better not tell the Pigeon-Racers’ Association, but it turns out there’s a sly fellow who traps them,” Father answered. “He lives out on the edge of town, so nobody’s going to catch him at it. If I lived out there, I would, too. It can’t be very hard. Pigeons aren’t the smartest birds God ever made. A few bread crumbs and you can probably get as many as you want.”

As she had with the rabbit, Mother asked, “What did you pay for them?”

As he had with the rabbit, Father looked pained and didn’t give her a straight answer. “It’s not as though we’re spending money on nightclubs or Strength through Joy cruises,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” Mother said. “But we are spending money on food and fuel and rent, and we aren’t made of gold. So what did you pay?”

“We won’t go to the poorhouse tomorrow on account of them,” Samuel Goldman told her.

“How about the day after tomorrow?” Sarah suggested.

Her father sent her a reproachful look. “Doesn’t the Bible say something about ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’?”

“I’m not an ungrateful child,” Sarah said. “I’ll never be ungrateful when you bring meat home.” She just hoped her rumbling stomach didn’t embarrass her in front of her parents. If it didn’t, that would only be because theirs were rumbling, too.