“It’s pretty,” Chaim insisted. “And it doesn’t sound the same here as it does in the States.”
“What? The fuckin’ birdth thpeak Thpanish?” Mike put on a sarcastic Castilian lisp.
“No, but there’s different ones here,” Chaim said. He was going to get pissed off if his buddy couldn’t see what he saw, couldn’t hear what he heard. He could feel it coming like a rash.
“Sparrows. Pigeons. Starlings. Crows. Stop the fucking presses. Call Walter fucking Winchell.” Mike was tall and slim and blond and handsome, none of which adjectives applied to Chaim. At the moment, the other American was also a royal pain in the ass.
“Only reason there’s pigeons and sparrows-these kindsa sparrows-and cocksucking starlings in the USA is that they’re imports,” Chaim said. “And the crows here aren’t the same as crows on the other side of the ocean. They’ve got bigger beaks, and they make different noises.”
“ You’d notice the stupid beaks,” Mike said.
“Your mother,” Chaim said without heat. Had somebody who wasn’t his friend made even an indirect crack about his own very Jewish beak, he would have rearranged the guy’s face for him. From Mike, though, he’d take it.
“How’s your wife?” the other Yank asked with a leer.
Chaim shrugged. “She’s back in the city, doing what she’s doing. And I’m here, doing what I’m doing.” That he’d made it with La Martellita struck him as a marvel. That she’d been willing to tie the knot for the sake of giving their accidental kid a last name was whatever came one step up from a marvel.
Mike tried to pinch off a hangnail with the other hand’s thumb and forefinger. “Doesn’t sound like the recipe for living happily ever after, y’know?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Chaim would rather have talked about birds. He hadn’t even started in on the hoopoe’s aerial ballet.
“What’ll you do when she dumps you after Junior comes out?” Mike found the sixty-four dollar question, all right.
All Chaim could do was shrug again. “Get drunk, I guess. Shoot some Fascists. What else is there to do?” Like Mike, he assumed she’d dump him once the baby was born. He also assumed the war in Spain would still be going on this fall. The way things looked right now, the war in Spain was liable to go on forever.
“Aren’t you tired of going hungry over there?” The enormous voice came from a microphone and speaker in Marshal Sanjurjo’s lines. “Come over to our side. We’ll give you a big bowl of mutton stew!”
Before, the Fascists had tempted Republican soldiers with chicken stew. Maybe they’d hired a new chef. More likely, they’d just put a new liar on the payroll. Chaim had captured Nationalist troops. They were every bit as skinny and miserable as the guys on his own side.
“Baa!” he bleated at the propaganda message. “Baa!”
Mike Carroll joined in. “Baa!” he yelled, even louder than Chaim. “Baa! Baa!”
“Mutton stew! Delicious mutton stew!” blared from the speaker.
“Baa!” This time, half a dozen Abe Lincolns bleated back. Before long, the whole stretch of Republican line northwest of Madrid was going “Baa! Baa! Baa!” in ragged chorus.
“Now look what you went and started,” Mike said. Chaim grinned. He was proud of himself.
Marshal Sanjurjo’s men didn’t think it was funny. Fascists, in Chaim’s experience, had all had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were very small. They had nasty ways of making their unhappiness known, too. Machine guns rattled. Mortar bombs whispered down. Even a battery of old German 77s well behind the line started up.
Naturally, the Internationals and the Czechs and the Spanish Republican soldiers in that stretch of the line fired back. “ Now look what you went and started,” Mike Carroll repeated, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.
A bullet cracked not far enough above Chaim’s head. He ducked automatically. “The fucking Battle of the Mutton Stew,” he said.
It was a joke, and then again it wasn’t. Bleating at the silly propaganda set off the shooting, sure. No matter what set it off, though, men on both sides were getting killed and maimed. He could hear wounded men screaming, all because he’d decided to make a noise like a sheep.
He didn’t want anything like that on his conscience. He told himself they would have got hit anyway. Himself told him he was full of it. Himself had a point, too. He’d been in Spain a long time. He’d seen how random war was. This guy bought a plot the day after he came into the line. That guy went without a scratch for years. Why? If it was anything more than God’s crapshoot, Chaim couldn’t imagine what. And, when he remembered not to, he didn’t even believe in God.
After both sides hauled their wounded away for whatever help the docs could give them, the Fascist announcer started going on about mutton stew again. He had a script, and he had his orders. This stretch of line was going to get so many repetitions. Then he’d go inflict himself somewhere else.
“Fuck you!” Chaim screamed, almost as loud without the loudspeaker as the announcer was with it. If he heard about mutton stew one more time, he’d snap. Or maybe he already had. “Fuck you up the ass! Fuck your mother! And fuck the sheep your fucking mutton stew comes from, too!”
That produced scattered cheers from the Internationals. He thought the only reason it just produced scattered cheers was that they didn’t want to risk starting up the firefight again. And, to his amazement and delight, it also produced a few scattered cheers from the Nationalist trenches. Those had to come from men sure they were off by themselves so nobody could rat on them.
Mike heard the cheers from Sanjurjo’s side, too. “Wow, man,” he said. “You really struck a nerve there.”
“Bet your ass I did,” Chaim replied. “When’s the last time you figure one of those poor sorry dingleberries even smelled mutton stew, let alone tasted any? That clown with the mike probably drives them even crazier than he drives me.”
Carroll sent him a speculative stare. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
The next day, Brigadier Kossuth summoned Chaim to his headquarters behind the lines. Like La Martellita, the Internationals’ CO used a nom de guerre, though he was a Magyar like his namesake. “I hear you’ve been running your mouth again,” he said in German. He was old enough to have learned it in the dead Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Thanks to Yiddish, Chaim could follow German. “Afraid so,” he admitted cheerfully.
Yiddish didn’t faze the brigadier. “Why?” he asked with a glower that would have turned a basilisk to stone.
But nobody’s glower was going to make Chaim quake in his drafty boots. He’d been through way too much for that. “Because I got sick and tired of all that crap about mutton stew,” he said.
Kossuth eyed him the way a chameleon eyes a fly just before its tongue flicks out. “Are all Americans as deranged as you?” he asked with what sounded like clinical detachment and probably masked fury.
“Some of us are even worse,” Chaim said: he wouldn’t let the country down.
“Oh, I doubt that.” Kossuth knew what he was up against, all right. “And you managed to knock up that human hand grenade, too… Tell me, if you would: how does one man find so much trouble?”
“I volunteered for it,” Chaim answered. “I could have stayed back in the States.”
“Everyone might have been better off if you had. Including you,” Kossuth said.
“Spain wouldn’t.” Pride rang in Chaim’s voice.
That basilisk-petrifying glower again. When Chaim refused to wilt under it, the Magyar brigadier sighed. “Anything is possible-but nothing is likely.” He jerked a thumb toward the tent flap. “Now get out.” Whistling, Chaim got.
Peggy Druce was getting the urge to travel again. After her adventures and misadventures in war-torn Europe, she would have bet she’d be content-hell, be overjoyed-to stay in Philadelphia the rest of her days. But things didn’t work out like that. After so long living by her wits and by what she could browbeat out of unhappy officials, ordinary life seemed Boring with a capital B.