Ferenc clung to the rifle the way a little kid would cling to a velveteen rabbit. “Won’t,” he said, as if he were about to stick a thumb in his mouth.
Tibor wouldn’t have minded if he did-it might have calmed him down. “Hand it over, dammit.” He let his patience show. “I know what happened. I’m sorry about what happened. But you can’t go shooting up the countryside on account of that.”
“Why not? The Americans did.” Ferenc just wanted to hit back.
“But they’re a country. You’re just one fellow. You aren’t even a general or anything. You’re just a fucking private like me. You’d get yourself killed for nothing. And if anybody you’re related to is still alive, they’d roast ’em over a slow fire to pay you back for going off the rails.”
Ferenc’s eyes filled with tears. “It isn’t fair,” he whimpered. “It isn’t right.”
That was undoubtedly true. What it had to do with the price of beer was liable to be a different story, though. As far as Tibor could see, very little that had happened since he and Ferenc were born was either fair or right. Fair and right were for big countries, like Russia and America. Germany had been big enough to make Hungary dance to its tune-but, as things turned out, not big enough to keep playing it. Otherwise, the Germans wouldn’t have rival foreign armies stationed on their soil.
And if Ferenc was getting weepy…Tibor reached out and grabbed his squadmate’s Mosin-Nagant. “There you go, pal,” he said. “Just take it easy for a while. Sooner or later, things’ll look better.”
“Later,” Ferenc said, in tones that might have come from the Mask of Tragedy brought to life.
Tibor didn’t care, or not very much. He had the rifle. That was what counted. Unless the Russian generals masterminding this operation sent their Hungarian allies over the border in the next couple of hours, Ferenc didn’t need it. He’d be as soppy as that “Gloomy Sunday” song for a while. The other soldiers just had to make sure he didn’t hang himself or do anything else stupid that he couldn’t take back.
Sergeant Gergely noticed Tibor carrying the rifle. “That’s not yours,” the noncom barked. He might be-he was-a son of a bitch, but he was one goddamn observant son of a bitch.
“No, Sergeant.” Tibor agreed to what he couldn’t very well deny. “It’s Ferenc’s. He was talking about going after the Americans again.”
“I wouldn’t mind if they shot him. It would serve him right.” The milk of human kindness was sour cream in Gergely. Shaking his head, he went on, “But he can’t go starting a war all by himself, can he? And Schmalkalden is close enough to the border to give him a chance of doing it.”
He pronounced the name of the German town perfectly. Tibor would have, too; they both spoke German well, even if they didn’t always want their allies to know it. Hardly anyone in the world but Hungarians knew Magyar. German was Hungary’s window to what the rest of Europe was saying, and had been for as long as Hungary had been joined to Austria at the hip.
“Well, he won’t now, not till he gets the rifle back,” Tibor said.
“You do a good job of handling him,” Gergely said. Tibor gaped; the noncom wasn’t in the habit of doling out praise. Gergely went on, “Well, you do. I’ve noticed. You know who else does?”
“No, Sergeant.” Tibor wasn’t used to the older man in a talkative mood. It unnerved him.
“Szolovits,” Gergely said. “Yeah, the sheeny. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?” A twisted smile on his face, Gergely bobbed his head and went about his business, almost as if he thought he’d been talking with a fellow human being.
After a little thought, Tibor was less surprised than the sergeant that Isztvan Szolovits might have a better idea than most about what Ferenc was going through right now. When the Nazis overthrew Admiral Horthy and used the Arrow Cross as their puppets, lots of Jews had headed for death camps.
That didn’t happen till 1944, late in the war. More Jews survived in Hungary than in countries where the SS had got to run wild sooner. Even so, how many relatives had Szolovits lost? Chances were he understood Ferenc’s misery better than most of the other soldiers.
The company got a night’s pass. They piled into a couple of ancient buses and went into Schmalkalden to see if German beer was as good as people said. The town had been bombed in the last war, but there weren’t a whole lot of towns between the Atlantic and Moscow that hadn’t been. It was shabby but orderly. The civilians on the street wore clothes that were mostly old, but well-tended. Tibor hardly noticed that; it was the same as he was used to at home.
“Bier, bitte,” he told the barkeep as soon as he found a tavern (it didn’t take long).
“Here you go.” The man gave him a curious look as he served him. “You’re not Russian, are you?”
“No, I’m Hungarian,” Tibor answered. “How did you know?” His German would have an accent different from a Russian’s. His uniform was of a greener khaki than the Red Army used, and of what he thought was a smarter cut.
But the bartender told him, “You said please. Next Ivan who does that in here will be the first. And because you did, that one’s on me.”
“Danke schön!” Tibor exclaimed. He sipped. It wasn’t great beer, but it was pretty good. That it was free made it taste even better.
“You didn’t fight in the last war, did you?” The German shook his head as he answered his own question: “Nah. Of course you didn’t. You’re too young-you’re just a kid.”
Since Tibor was just a kid, he couldn’t even resent that. He said, “My sergeant did.”
“That a fact?” The bartender paused to light a cigarette. By his harsh, rasping chuckle, he went through a lot of them. After blowing out smoke, he continued, “So he’s one of those sock people, is he? Hell of a lot of ’em around these days.”
“Sock people?” Tibor echoed. He wasn’t sure he’d heard straight. If he had, he feared he’d tripped over an idiom he didn’t understand.
But the bartender nodded. “Sockeleute, ja. You know the kind I mean. I call ’em that ’cause they fit on either foot just as easy.”
“Oh!” Tibor giggled like a girl when he got it. He wondered what Sergeant Gergely would have to say if he came out with that. Something interesting and memorable, he had no doubt. He might try it-on a day when he was feeling more suicidal than poor Ferenc did right now. Taking his courage in both hands, he asked, “Did you fight in the last war?”
The bartender looked about forty-five, not that Tibor was any too good at guessing ages. But every German too young to wear a long white beard was likely to have carried a Mauser or a Schmeisser at some time between 1939 and 1945.
“Ach, you bet I did, sonny,” the man answered. “You can’t see, but my left leg is gone a little below the knee. I get around all right, even if I’m not what you’d call quick any more. Shell fragment nailed me when we were pulling back from Kiev at the end of 1943. And after I was on my feet-well, my foot-again, I got to sell drinks to the Russians who blew me up. Life is full of shit sometimes, you know? But what are you gonna do?”
“What is there except the best you can?” Tibor said. His own country lay under Stalin’s heavy thumb. It had lost a city, lost it utterly and forever, because it did. Here he was in Germany, about to go to war for Stalin’s cause, which mattered not at all to him. Doing the best he could, he finished his beer and slid the seidel across the bar for a refill.
–
Days were starting to get longer now. The sun went to bed later and got up earlier at the end of a week than it had at the beginning. But night still stretched plenty far enough for the Red Army tankmen to peel the camouflage netting off their machines, to make sure they had plenty of fuel, and to do all the checks they could in the dark.