No, her main worry was that Bill was safe. She dreaded every unfamiliar car that stopped near the house. She stared from the front windows till the people who got out of the car proved not to be Air Force officers bringing her the worst news in the world.
But the Red Chinese had friends who’d taught them how to be Communists. And Joseph Stalin couldn’t let his friends and allies get bombed that way without doing anything about it, not if he wanted them to go on taking him seriously.
And so, four nights after American B-29s smashed the Manchurian cities, Russian Tu-4s, flying low so radar wouldn’t spot them till too late, bombed Aberdeen and Norwich, Rouen and Nancy, Bremen and Augsburg. You might not know exactly where in Britain and France and Germany those towns had lain, but you knew where Britain and France and Germany were. They weren’t in the back of beyond, the way Manchuria was.
Then Stalin went on Radio Moscow and made what Marian thought was an uncommonly smarmy speech even by the standards of the twentieth century, which had seen more than its share of smarmy political speeches. “The United States has seen fit to use atomic bombs against a fraternal socialist state assisting in a war of national liberation, and to do so without justification or provocation,” the Soviet boss said. “This cannot go unpunished. It cannot, and it has not.”
In the English version Marian listened to, Stalin continued, “President Truman stressed that the United States did not attack the territory of the peace-loving peasants and workers of the USSR. I take equal pains to stress that the Soviet Union has not attacked the territory of the USA. Nor will we, unless our own territory is attacked. But the United States must understand that our allies are as important to us as its allies are to it. He has struck at our allies’ provincial cities; we have done the same against as many of his allies’ towns. We have not increased his terror, but we have unflinchingly met it.”
As soon as the speech was over, an American newscaster said, “The North Atlantic Treaty obliges America to consider an attack on its European allies to be an attack on itself. An attack of this scale, coupled with the Russian mobilization in the eastern zone of Germany and in Czechoslovakia, has caused great concern in the White House. President Truman will address the nation tomorrow to discuss the threat of our safety.”
“The President will address the nation?” Linda asked.
“That’s right, honey. It means he’ll talk to the country,” Marian told her daughter.
“I know our address,” Linda said. “You taught it to me in case I ever got lost, but I never did. Can I go on the radio and tell people what it is?”
“It’s not quite the same thing,” Marian said.
“How come?” Linda wasn’t going to let go of it till she got an answer that made sense to her. But how were you supposed to explain war so it made sense to a four-year-old?
For that matter, how were you supposed to explain war so it made sense to anybody? I’ll keep hurting you till you do what I say. That was what it boiled down to. If she tried to do that to the family across the street to make them quit throwing loud, drunken parties, the police would cart her off to jail. Her angry dreams of burning down their house stayed firmly in her imagination, where they belonged.
But no policeman could stop one country from going after another. For a moment, it had looked as though the United Nations would become that kind of cop. But the only reason the UN backed America’s move against the North Koreans was that Russia was boycotting the proceedings.
If the international organization had taken control of all the A-bombs after World War II ended, and if no country had been able to make them on its own after that…Had that happened, policemen might be able to keep unruly countries in line. But it hadn’t. The USA had the bomb. So did the Russians, now. That made them both like the Mafia in Chicago in the Twenties, only more so. They could do what they aimed to do, not what anybody else told them to do.
And so…war.
“When’s Daddy coming home?” Linda asked, maybe out of the blue, maybe not.
“I don’t know exactly,” Marian answered. “When he can. When they let him. When the war’s over.” Those were all possibly true. Another possibly true response was Never. Marian refused to dwell on that one now. It was for when a branch scraping on the roof woke her at three in the morning and she couldn’t go back to sleep.
“I wish he would,” Linda said.
“Me, too,” her mother said. Bill had been gone for most of a year now. That felt like a long time to Marian. It had to be an eternity for Linda. She wasn’t the same person now as she had been then. She’d learned the alphabet. She could sound out words on her blocks and on pages in her books. More seemed to be going on inside her every single day.
She changed. She grew. Bill, meanwhile, stayed what he’d been for her ever since he went back on duty: pictures on the wall and on the dresser in the big bedroom. He was still somebody she remembered and loved, but out of the ever more distant past.
Marian bit down on the inside of her lower lip. Sometimes Bill seemed that way to her, too. Oh, she got letters from him. She wrote to him, too. How could you pour out your heart, though, when you knew a smirking censor stood between you and the one you loved?
For that matter, how could you pour out your heart on paper any which way? Marian always felt like a fool when she tried to set down what was going on in her heart. Writing wasn’t made to do things like that, not unless you were Shakespeare or somebody. So it seemed to her, anyway. She could write about how a pot roast had turned out or how a hinge on the closet door needed fixing. She could even write about funny things Linda said. Love letters? When they were together, she could tell Bill she loved him. She did tell him so, all the time.
On paper, though, it was different. The words looked stupid. They sounded stupid, too. Bill had to feel the same way. His letters were full of stories about baseball games between bomber crews and about who was on the latest USO tour. He’d write Miss you. Love you…and that would be that. Marian believed he did miss her and love her. She would have liked to read it in a way that made her feel it as well as see it on the page, though.
She would have liked that, but she didn’t expect to get it. She’d married a flyer, not a writer. A cousin of hers had married a writer. He drank. He didn’t make much money. He chased other women. And he was a cold fish in person no matter what kind of pretty words he could put down on paper.
“Do you remember the air-raid alerts Seattle and other West Coast towns went through in the early days of the Second World War?” the radio announcer asked rhetorically. “We didn’t know what Japan could do, and we didn’t want to take any chances. Well, civil-defense officials say those days are back again. We will be testing our defense tomorrow at ten A.M. Don’t be alarmed when the sirens go off. It’s not the Russians. It’s only a test. No one expects that the Russians can really get here. We just want to stay on the safe side.”
Marian did remember those dark days after Pearl Harbor. She didn’t want to think days like those could come again. But she knew that not wanting to think it didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Air-raid alert. Ten tomorrow morning.
–
“Come on! Come on! Come on!” Captain Oleg Gurevich yelled over the rumble of a company’s worth of big diesel engines. “Are we ready to move? We’d fucking well better be ready to move!”
Konstantin Morozov waved from the turret of his tank to show it could roll whenever the captain ordered. Night was falling on the Red Army encampment near Meiningen. The tanks would move up to the border between the Russian zone in Germany and the American under cover of darkness. By the time the sun rose tomorrow, from the air it would look as if these tanks, and the rest at this enormous base, hadn’t gone anywhere.