As patiently as he could, Vasili said, “They call them Mex dollars in China. It’s still silver. It’s still heavy. If you can’t pass it, you can melt it down.” He sounded as persuasive as he knew how, as if he were trying to get a girl into bed with him. “Come on, pal. Take me across and then forget you ever saw me.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
“Of course it’s like that. What, you think I came to China for my fucking vacation? Come on, take me over. It’ll be worthwhile for you, as long as you keep your yap shut.”
If the fisherman decided it was too risky, all Vasili could do was wait till another boat came along. If another boat ever came along. He made himself remember that, and didn’t cuss as hard as he might have. He tried to look friendly and harmless.
He must have managed, because the Russian rowed over. The boat’s nose or prow or whatever you called it scraped on Chinese mud. “Khorosho. Hop in.”
In Vasili hopped. He showed the fisherman the trade dollar and the opium. He also flipped open his straight razor. “I’ll pay you when we get across.”
Not much later, the boat grated on Soviet soil. It sounded the same as the Chinese mud had. Vasili left the coin and the glass jar. He took three trout.
“Thanks,” he said, and got out. The fisherman, whose name he’d never learned, went back into the Amur as fast as he could.
I’ve come home, Vasili thought. Then he found out what raw fish tasted like.
–
Isztvan Szolovits crouched in a foxhole that wasn’t deep enough. Up ahead, a machine gun threw death in his direction. Along with the stream of reports from the gun, every so often a bullet would crack past not nearly far enough over his head. The team running that gun knew what they were doing with it. They traversed it so the rounds streamed back and forth. Anyone who got up and tried to advance on it asked to catch one with his teeth, or maybe with his navel. The gunners were shooting low.
Isztvan wasn’t sure whether the machine gun was in Bochum or Essen. For that matter, he wasn’t sure whether he was in Bochum or Essen. The two German towns west of Dortmund blended seamlessly, one into the other. The only difference between them Isztvan could see was that mail to them didn’t go through the same post office.
He still had no idea why nobody’d killed him. He had to be luckier than he’d ever imagined. The Russians were determined to get as much use as they could from the Hungarian troops they’d brought forward. They thought using soldiers meant using them up, too. As far as the Russians were concerned, men were as disposable as bullets or boots.
That applied to their own troops. It applied even more to soldiers from Hungary or Poland or Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria or Romania. If getting killed advanced the sacred cause of socialism, or if the Russian marshals even suspected it might, they spent troops like kopeks.
Foomp! Foomp! Those were mortars going off. With the evil little beasts, the Hungarians didn’t even have to stick their noses out of their holes to shoot back at the machine gun. Isztvan approved of shooting back without running the risk of getting hurt.
The machine gun fell silent. Isztvan wondered whether the mortar had killed the men who served it or they were bluffing and waiting to shoot down anybody naive enough to try to advance. Such questions were important. If you were a Hungarian soldier fighting in the Ruhr, they were life-and-death important.
In the lull, somebody from the other side shouted in Magyar: “What are you fools doing fighting for Stalin? Come over to the Americans! You’ll be free, and no one will try to kill you or make you do anything you don’t want to do!”
Hearing the man reminded Isztvan how many Magyars had left their own country for the United States in the days before the First World War. It reminded him all kinds of ways, in fact. The American soldier who spoke the language had plainly learned from his folks as a child, not in school. He had a peasant accent from the back of beyond, and an old-fashioned peasant accent at that. Magyar in Hungary had moved on, while his was stuck in the past like a fly in amber.
None of which had anything to do with the price of beer. He might talk like a clodhopper from 1895, but his message was modern as tomorrow. He wasn’t saying anything Isztvan hadn’t asked himself a hundred times. Isztvan didn’t care a filler about the solidarity of workers and peasants all over the world. He was here because Stalin and Stalin’s followers, both Russian and Hungarian, would have killed him or tortured him or jailed him had he tried to refuse. That was the long and short of it.
“Kibaszott szarházi!” Those were Sergeant Gergely’s dulcet tones. How did he know that the Magyar-speaking American was a fucking shithouse clown? Odds were he didn’t, but that didn’t stop him.
“God fuck your stinking, wrinkled whore of a mother!” the guy on the other side yelled back. Isztvan giggled. Maybe he hadn’t learned all his Magyar from his mommy and daddy.
“Yell all you want, dog’s dick,” Gergely said. “We didn’t drop any A-bombs on your country.”
“No, Stalin did. You just suck him off,” the Hungarian-American replied.
Sergeant Gergely spoke to his own men: “You see how we’re all friends together, right?”
Some of the Magyars answered to show him they agreed. Whether in fact they did or not was anybody’s guess. Gergely had to know that. This was his second war fighting for a dubious cause. He had a different dubious cause now from the one he’d aided during World War II, but, as then, Hungary was doing what a great power required, not what it wanted to do itself.
Isztvan Szolovits kept his mouth shut. He didn’t think protestations of loyalty would give the sergeant any more confidence in him. For that matter, he had no confidence in himself. If he found a chance to surrender to the Americans without getting killed, he figured he would jump at it. The Magyar-speaking Yank had that much right.
In the meantime, though, he needed to keep fighting. Chances to surrender didn’t come along every day. The Americans would cheerfully kill him most of the time. The best way to stay alive and wait for the moment he might not find involved shooting back at them when they fired at him.
Which they did, with rifles, machine guns, and artillery. Under cover of all that flying metal, some of them started moving forward through the wreckage of whichever German city this turned out to be. They aimed to flank out the Hungarians and drive them back.
Isztvan was ready to retreat, if he could come out of his hole without getting killed. But half a dozen Soviet T-54s rumbled forward like dinosaurs squashing little mammals under their feet in some prehistoric swamp. Unlike those ancient little mammals, some of the Americans carried bazookas. But when two rockets in a row glanced off the tanks’ turtle turrets without penetrating, the Yanks gave it up as a bad job and fell back to their old line.
An American who’d stopped a machine-gun bullet from one of the tanks with his face lay only fifty meters or so from Isztvan’s hole. Greed overcame caution. He crawled to the dead Yank, took his food and cigarettes and first-aid kit, and slithered back to cover.
After dark fell, he gave Sergeant Gergely two of the three packs he’d looted. “Thanks, kid, but those Russian tankers deserve these more than I do,” the veteran said.
“Could be, but I know you and I don’t know them,” Isztvan said. “Boy, that American who spoke Magyar sure talked funny, didn’t he?”
“Oh, just a little,” Gergely answered. “Like he had cowshit on his boots and rode a donkey to church. I’ll tell you something else, though-you think the Yanks won’t fuck you over same as the krauts and the Ivans, you’re nuts. They’re big. You ain’t. That’s all it takes.”
“Could be,” Szolovits said again.
Gergely couldn’t have seen the expression on his face. It was too dark. He chuckled anyhow, unpleasantly. “Don’t do anything stupid-that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” he said. Isztvan wished it weren’t such good advice.