Along with the rest of the men in his squad, he tramped out to the truck waiting in front of the barracks. Sergeant Gergely kept right on cussing as they climbed in one after another. He was in his thirties, almost twice the age of most of the kids he led. He’d fought for Admiral Horthy in the big war and for the Arrow Cross after the Nazis found out Horthy was trying to escape from the conflict. He’d fought against the Russians in Russia, and he’d defended Budapest against them after the tide turned.
And now here he was, a sergeant in the Hungarian People’s Army. He wore a Russian-style helmet instead of the German coal-scuttle model that had kept fragments away from his brain in the last dance. He carried a Russian submachine gun. Well, he might have done that from 1941 to 1945, too. Plenty of Hungarian-and German-soldiers had. The PPD and PPSh weren’t pretty, but they were reliable, and they put a lot of lead in the air.
How had Gergely escaped a reeducation camp? The only thing Tibor could think of was that the Russians realized they needed some noncoms who knew what they were doing. It wasn’t as if they had men of their own who spoke Magyar. No doubt both the MGB and the Hungarian secret police were keeping an eye on the sergeant. They hadn’t landed on him yet, though.
“A horse’s cock up your ass, Szolovits!” the sergeant barked as he got into the truck. “Shove forward! Gimme some room!” He ragged on Szolovits because the tall, skinny soldier was a Jew. He ragged on the other guys because they were soldiers.
Groaning and farting, the truck chugged away from the barracks. It was a beat-up American Studebaker, no doubt sent to the USSR during the big war and used hard from that moment on. The Russians made their own trucks now. Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria and Romania got their hand-me-downs.
Tibor’s rifle was a hand-me-down. The varnish on the Mosin-Nagant’s chipped, cracked birch stock couldn’t hide the bloodstain under it. At least one fellow who’d used the piece hadn’t been lucky. But the action worked smoothly. One of the things Sergeant Gergely was good for was making sure his minions kept their weapons clean and knew how to use them. If Tibor started shooting-no, when he started-he had a fair chance of hitting what he aimed at.
I don’t know why the hell I bother. Gergely’s rifle-range snarl dinned in his memory. If you can’t see that taking care of your rifle will help keep you breathing, odds are you’re too fucking dumb to deserve to live.
They rolled on through Pest, then crossed a battered bridge over the Danube into Buda. The two halves were and weren’t part of the same city. People from Budapest sneered at all other Magyars as country bumpkins, hardly better than Slovaks. People from Buda felt the same way about their neighbors from Pest. Men from Pest were ready to punch the faggots from Buda in the nose if they said anything like that too loudly.
One of the things that united the two sides of the Danube was the Russian siege they’d gone through at the end of the war. Everyone had endured the suffering of the damned then. The Red Army cleared the Nazis and the Arrow Cross soldiers block by block, house by house, sometimes room by room. The Germans and Magyars gave up at last because they couldn’t fight any more. Even after Budapest fell, the Germans mounted two ferocious counterattacks to try to get it back. No wonder both parts of the city were still full of shell-bitten, bullet-pocked ruins.
“Listen to me, you sorry shitheads, so you know what’s going on,” Sergeant Gergely rasped now. “The Americans dropped atomic bombs on China. To pay them back, the Soviet Union dropped some on France and England and Germany. They’ve got their whole army moving west now, so naturally we’re going to help out our fraternal socialist allies. Right?”
“Right, Sergeant!” Tibor chorused, along with everybody else in the squad. Telling your sergeant he was wrong might not be suicidal, but you weren’t likely to be happy after you did it.
Not for the first time, Tibor wondered how Sergeant Gergely came out so naturally with phrases like fraternal socialist allies. Had he mouthed Fascist slogans the same way when he wore that other helmet?
It wasn’t something a private could come out and ask him. The Hungarian People’s Army did its best to pretend its predecessors hadn’t fought side by side with Hitler and the Nazis. Its best wasn’t perfect, or people like Sergeant Gergely would be dead now. But the amnesia ran pretty deep.
“Sergeant?” That was Szolovits.
“What do you want?” Gergely glowered at him.
“What do we do if the Americans drop an atom bomb on us?”
“What the hell do you think we do? We fucking die, that’s what. Anybody else got a stupid question?” Gergely said.
The guy next to Gyula nudged him. Gyula Pusztai was as tall as Isztvan Szolovits, and at least twice as wide through the shoulders. He was strong as a bull. Unfortunately, he was also about as smart as a bull. “Did the sergeant say we were going off to fight the Americans?” he whispered.
“That’s about the size of it,” Tibor whispered back. Sergeant Gergely gave them both a fishy stare. Most of the time, you’d catch hell for any unauthorized talk. But they were heading off to war. Chances were the whole Hungarian People’s Army was heading off to war, with its rickety trucks and secondhand rifles and men who were still figuring out how to be good Communists.
Gyula might not have been the brightest candle in the chandelier, but he knew what he thought about that. “Christ have mercy!” he yipped, something no good Communist was supposed to say. “They’ll slaughter us!” He was too horrified to remember to keep whispering.
Tibor waited for Sergeant Gergely to tear Gyula to pieces, either with his barbed tongue or with his knobby, hairy-backed hands. But the sergeant’s face…mellowed? Tibor wouldn’t have believed his eyes-didn’t dare believe them-till Gergely said, “Don’t worry about it more than you can help, sonny. I said the same thing when we got on a train to go fight the Russians. I was wet behind the ears then. You go into combat, you grow up in a hurry. And I’m still here, you’ll notice.”
“Yes, Sergeant.” By the way Gyula Pusztai said it, he also wondered why the sergeant wasn’t ripping into him.
Gergely made a small production of lighting a cigarette. Then he said, “The sorry bastards who went east in 1942, there aren’t a hell of a lot of us left. The Russians did slaughter us, in carload lots. And the Americans’ll do the same goddamn thing to us this time around. Gives you something to look forward to, you know?”
Gyula had nothing to say to that. What could you say? What went through Tibor’s head was That’s what we get for being a small country. The Nazis had aimed Hungary at the Soviet Union and fired it. If the Russians killed Magyars by carload lots, more of Hitler’s Germans stayed alive. Not enough more, as it turned out. Now the Communists in Moscow were firing Hungary at the United States. If the Americans killed piles of Hungarians, more Russians might survive.
Enough more? Tibor had trouble believing it. Not that Stalin would care. Like Hitler, Stalin cared less for a life than Sergeant Gergely cared for a smoke. He burned through lives faster than Gergely burned through cigarettes, too.
And if they really started throwing atomic bombs around, lives would go up in smoke faster than ever. How many cities had already got thrown into the incinerator? The front line might wind up the safest place of all.
–
Marian Staley listened to the news with shock and disbelief that grew every day. When President Truman announced that the United States had used atomic bombs against cities in Manchuria, they were cities she’d never heard of, cities with names the newsman had trouble pronouncing the same way twice, cities-not to put too fine a point on it-full of Chinamen. As with the Japs in the last war, who could work up any real sympathy for swarms of Chinamen blasted off the face of the earth? Especially when they, or the people who told them what to do, were Reds?