Maybe he laid the limp on too thick. “Come over here!” the MGB man ordered. “Let’s have a look at that leg, dammit.”
“Tak,” Ihor repeated. He remembered not to lose the limp as he walked over to the unwelcome visitor to the kolkhoz.
When he pulled up his trouser leg, the MGB man’s face changed a little. It was an ugly wound, with a scar like a crab’s spread claws and with a good-sized cavity in the muscle where the surgeon had taken out flesh so it wouldn’t rot and poison him. “Put yourself in order,” the fellow said grudgingly. “You really did stop something there, didn’t you?”
“Afraid I did.” Ihor wanted to ask him, And what did you do in the Great Patriotic War, pussy? Odds were the bastard had spent his time in a heated office a thousand kilometers from the front. His only worry would have been whether he could scare the pretty file clerk into sucking him off. But you couldn’t remind him of that, or he’d make you sorry. He had as many ways as beer had bubbles.
“All right,” he said now, and made a tickmark on a sheet of paper in his clipboard. “We’ll leave you here, then. I don’t think that leg will let you go back into the infantry.”
“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade!” That one never let you down. Here, it meant Whatever you say is fine with me. Ihor was lying through his teeth, of course. Had the Chekist tried to recall him, he would have done his level best to arrange an accident for the man before they left the collective farm.
As things were, the son of a bitch was taking four men from the kolkhoz. Radio Moscow bragged about Soviet victory after Soviet victory, but how many men were going into the sausage machine to win those victories (if they were victories)? Enough so the Red Army needed more bodies. That was as much as Ihor could say.
Would the authorities adjust the collective farm’s production norms to take into account the workers it suddenly didn’t have? That was so funny, Ihor almost burst out laughing. They would pretend it had as many workers as ever. After all, they had their larger, oblast-wide production norms to consider.
The chances that the kolkhoz’s crops would be as large with fewer people to tend them were slim and none. The chances that anyone would get in trouble for failing to meet production norms, though, were also slim and none. Somehow or other, the norms would be met…on paper, anyway. If the actual grain brought in from the actual fields didn’t quite match what got set down on paper, well, what could you expect in a world full of unreliable human beings?
On paper, the USSR set production records every year. People in the actual world went hungry? Chances were they were socially unreliable elements. How could you get excited about riffraff like that? No one had got excited when Stalin starved the Ukraine into submission. Ihor knew that only too well. No one had cared at all, no one except the Ukrainians. And they were too busy starving to give the matter their full attention.
“Volodymyr was a good fellow,” Anya whispered when she and Ihor were in bed together-one of the few places they could talk without much risk of being spied upon.
“They were all good fellows,” he whispered back. “We won’t be the same without them. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Even the pricks in the MGB know it.”
“The pricks in the MGB don’t know anything,” his wife said.
He shook his head, there in the darkness. She’d feel the motion even if she couldn’t see it. “They know. Oh, they know, all right. You bet they know. Those sons of bitches know damn near everything. Knowing isn’t the trouble. The trouble is, they don’t care.”
“That’s worse,” Anya said, still in a voice no one farther than thirty centimeters from her head could have heard.
“I guess it is. But what can anybody do about it? Not a stinking thing.” Ihor was no louder. You learned the tricks that kept you alive when you were small, and you got better and better at using them as time went by. He continued, “Why, darling, the MGB even knows if I do this.” He slid a hand under her flannel nightgown.
Her squeak was a little louder than the whispers she’d been using, but not a lot louder. She didn’t slap the hand away, either. She turned toward him instead. After all, he was still there to be turned toward. There were MGB men and MGB men. A really nasty one, or one who didn’t think he could make his own quota any other way, would have hauled him back into the army in spite of his wound. Unless he could have come up with one of those convenient “accidents” for the Chekist, he would have had to go, too. His other choices would have been worse.
So he fell asleep happy, and he woke up the next morning pretty happy, too. By the way Anya had snuggled up against him, she was also happy. That was good. If you weren’t happy with the person you’d married, you’d married the wrong person. And you would start looking for fun somewhere else, which meant you weren’t likely to stay married.
He stayed happy halfway through his first glass of sugared breakfast tea from the communal samovar. Then someone turned on the radio, just in time to catch Yuri Levitan going, “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” He was on in the morning. He was on at night. Did he ever sleep? Ihor would have wondered whether every male broadcaster on Radio Moscow called himself Yuri Levitan, only the man’s voice was so distinctive, it could have come from but one throat.
“What’s gone wrong in the world now?” Ihor said. He assumed something must have. What else was the news but stories about things that had gone wrong somewhere in the world?
After further reports about Soviet triumphs ever deeper in Germany, Levitan went on in grave tones: “In their frantic and futile efforts to interfere with the inexorable advance of the ever-victorious Red Army and its socialist allies, imperialist forces have struck again at the homelands of the workers and peasants’ vanguards on the march. American bombers with ordinary explosives hit Warsaw and Krakow, Prague and Bratislava, and Budapest last night, the evening of the twenty-fourth.”
He paused. An ordinary human being would have taken a sip of water or tea or vodka, or a drag from his cigarette. Machinelike Yuri Levitan was probably having his neck oiled or something. When he spoke again, he sounded more somber yet: “And the imperialists also struck at the heartland of the proletarian revolution. American conventional bombs fell on hero city Leningrad, on Minsk in the Byelorussian SSR, on Rovno in the Ukrainian SSR, and on Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East.”
Another pause from the broadcaster. Ihor listened for the squeak of the oilcan, but didn’t hear it. “Civilian casualties from these terror bombings have been heavy,” Levitan said when he resumed. “They include innocent children playing in a park in Leningrad. Comrade Stalin has vowed that repayment will be heavy.”
What were innocent children doing, playing in a park in the middle of a nighttime air raid? You could ask yourself questions like that. If you asked them of anyone else, you put yourself in deadly danger. Ihor knew better. He knew better even than to look as if such questions might occur to him. That was dangerous, too. Me? Just a dumb Ukrainian peasant, that’s all. There lay safety.
Maskirovka. It was all maskirovka. He drank more tea.
–
Tibor Nagy hadn’t hated Americans. He hadn’t hated Germans, either. He’d been a kid when they fought in Hungary. They were ragged and weary and knew they were losing, but when they had any food to spare they shared it. He’d seen Russians as the enemy-till he found that their soldiers didn’t act much different from anybody else. People were people, he’d decided. Not profound, maybe, but it suited him.