His boss grunted. He’d served on the Eastern Front, too. Most German men their age had. Some lucky guys had just fought in Italy or France. A few even luckier ones had sat out the war on garrison duty in places like Norway or Crete. But the Russians had been the big show-too big a show, as things turned out.
“Remember how you asked whether the Amis would want a hand against Stalin if things heated up?” Bachman asked.
“Ja.” Gustav lit a cigarette. Yes, he still felt rich every time he did it, as if he were smoking hundred-dollar bills like a fat cat in a cartoon. Silly, but there you were. After blowing a ragged smoke ring, he went on, “They won’t get much hotter than they did in Augsburg.”
“Or Bremen, or the other places the Russians fried,” Bachman agreed. But Augsburg was the closest one, less than two hundred kilometers away. Some people in Fulda who were out in the middle of the night claimed to have seen a flash on the southern horizon when the city that had stood there since the days of its namesake, the Roman Emperor Augustus, abruptly ceased to be. Were they lying? How big did an explosion have to be for you to see it from so far away? Big-that was the only answer Gustav could come up with.
“So what about the Americans?” Gustav asked. If the Russians felt like it, they could drop one of those bombs on Fulda, too. What would hold them back? Needing to go through here was the only thing he could think of. They might not be able to do that if the place glowed in the dark.
“Well, you know how we print things for the town and for the Burgomeister,” Bachman said. Gustav nodded. Willi Stoiber was a fat blowhard, which made him ideal to run the city. How he’d got through the denazification trials, Gustav couldn’t guess, but he had. Max Bachman continued, “So he likes to run his mouth. The Americans are talking about setting up what they want to call a national emergency militia.”
“Is that anything like an army?” Gustav’s voice was dry.
“Of course not. We’re Germans. We don’t deserve an army. Besides, it has a different name.” Bachman was as cynical as he was.
Gustav remembered his nightmares, something he usually tried not to do while he was awake. “Haven’t we paid our dues?” he said. “I fought the Ivans as much as I ever wanted to, thanks. If the Amis are so hot to have a go, let them take their crack at it this time. They didn’t want to when we could have done it together before, so to hell with them.” He made as if to spit on the floor, but didn’t.
His boss clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Only one thing wrong with that.”
“What?” Gustav Hozzel didn’t see anything wrong with it.
“If the Americans fight the Russians here and they lose, they won’t have commissars telling them what to do and spying on them from now till the end of time. We will, worse luck,” Bachman said.
“Oh.” In spite of himself, Gustav grimaced. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right, dammit.”
Plenty of people had fled from the Russian zone to freer lands farther west. The tales they told would curl anyone’s hair. More than a few of them lived in Fulda now. And, among those refugees, chances were that some played a double game. Cursing Stalin’s name at the top of your lungs didn’t necessarily mean you weren’t also whispering things in the MGB’s ear.
But those horror stories rang true to Gustav. Counterattacks that briefly won back some ground showed what the Russians did when they took over German soil. They didn’t play the game by the rules; as far as they were concerned, the game had no rules. Of course, the Wehrmacht and the SS hadn’t had clean hands when they were going forward, either. On the Eastern Front, no one’s hands were clean.
Noise outside the print shop distracted him from his gloomy memories, but not from his gloom. That noise was of big, snorting engines and of caterpillar tracks grinding on asphalt and cobblestones. American panzers and self-propelled guns had smoother lines than the slab-sided vehicles the Wehrmacht used, but they sounded pretty much the same.
“Are you going to sign up for this emergency militia, Max?” Gustav loaded the name with a certain sour relish.
“Probably. My guess is it’s already too late, though. With the bombs dropping, they won’t have time to get us shaken out into units and give us uniforms and weapons. Too bad. I wouldn’t mind getting myself an M-1. That’s a pretty good rifle.”
“My old Mauser carbine would do fine,” Gustav said. “Getting ammo for it might be tricky, though.” The standard German caliber had been 7.92mm. Some of that was bound to be floating around, but Gustav didn’t know where to lay his hands on it. He hadn’t worried about it from the time he surrendered till this new trouble blew up.
The Americans used what they called.30-caliber rounds, which were 7.62mm to the rest of the world. They did a perfectly respectable job of killing people, and they were easy to get hold of.
Max said, “Shall we do some work?”
“Why not?” Gustav answered. “That way, Saint Peter can see we were busy until the bomb blew us to smoke.”
His boss smiled a twisted smile. Gustav had seen that expression before, on the faces of Landsers trying to show they weren’t scared when a swarm of drunken Russians were howling and screaming and getting ready to roll over their trenches. The Ivans often acted as if they didn’t care whether they lived or died. Considering the kind of country they had to live in, who could blame them?
Even getting through the day wasn’t easy. Max kept the radio running, which he didn’t do most of the time. A newsman said that Stalin said he had as much right to blow up those European cities as Truman did to blow up Chinese cities. He might even have been right, not that that did the people in those cities any good. The dead had to number in the hundreds of thousands.
“The guy on the news is going on like that’s a big number,” Gustav said after music replaced word of the latest disasters. “For Stalin, it’s nothing but pocket change.”
“Maybe the asshole didn’t fight on the Ostfront,” Max answered. “Or maybe he wants people to think he didn’t.”
The first thing Luisa asked Gustav when they both got home was, “Will it start for real?”
He sent that hooded look toward the east again. Then he sighed. “Probably,” he said. “Well, we had five or six good years, anyhow. What’s for supper?”
She took a pot out of the oven. It had simmered in there all day, since she went off to her own job. Savory steam rose when she took off the lid. Turnips, cabbage, a cheap cut of pork to add some body and some flavor, dill, caraway seeds…
Gustav opened a couple of bottles of Black Hen from the local brewery. The malty beer would go well with what his wife had made. They clinked glasses after he poured. Everything tasted especially good to him. He was about halfway through the meal when he realized what that meant. He was savoring flavors more than usual because part of him believed this might be the last time he ever got the chance to do it.
Not too much later, he took Luisa to bed. She squeaked, but only a little. Again, it seemed extra good to Gustav. He hadn’t been able to do this before a Russian attack in the last war. Now he could, so he made the most of it.
6
When Cade Curtis woke up in the drafty little shed, two bowls were waiting for him. One held rice, the other kimchi. Neither was big. He thought it was a miracle these people gave him anything at all. They had so little themselves. Why would they spare some for a foreigner, a stranger, passing through?
Why? Because they were Christians, and took the name and the duties that went with it seriously. That was the only answer that occurred to Cade. It was also one that shamed him. Almost all the people back in the States called themselves Christians of one flavor or another. Damn few lived up to the label, though.