“Ouch!” Saul said. He turned to his sister and spread his hands in apology. “I didn’t know he had that in him.”
“Maybe he can get it removed,” Sarah said. “But I don’t mind silly talk. It feels good. If somebody talks silly talk at you, he thinks you’re a human being. Nobody seemed to think we were for a long time.”
“You’ve got that right,” Saul said. She’d gone through more anti-Semitism than he had. What they did to civilian Jews got worse after he escaped into the Wehrmacht. He didn’t want to think about that, so he didn’t. He pointed to the aviary. “Let’s go see the birds.”
They saw the birds, or some of them. Bomb fragments had torn open the wire mesh more than once during the war. There’d been some escapes. Saul wondered if hornbills or cocks of the rock were trying to make a living in bushes around the town.
A snack-seller had a tray of pretzels. Saul got some. “You people saved Germany!” said the old man with the tray. He wouldn’t take Saul’s money.
“Thank you very much,” Saul said.
After the old man was out of earshot, Theo said, “These taste like salt and sawdust. Who knows what was in the dough?”
“Who cares?” Sarah said. Theo shook his head to show he didn’t. They ambled through the zoo, chatting and laughing.
“Pass me the centimeter wrench, would you?” Adi Stoss was messing around inside the Panzer IV’s engine compartment.
Saul. His name is Saul, Theo Hossbach reminded himself as he handed him the wrench. But when you’d been thinking of somebody by one name for several years, adjusting to another wasn’t easy. It especially wasn’t easy when the other fellow plainly wanted to hang on to the name he’d been using, the name the Wehrmacht knew him by.
Theo looked around. Nobody else was close to them. He wouldn’t have worried about Lothar or Kurt-not very much, anyway. Claus Valentiner was another story. Theo hadn’t known him long enough to be easy around him. With Theo, long enough was usually a long time.
Usually. Not always. Since the coast was clear, he said, “Your sister’s nice.”
That got Adi out of the panzer’s engine. He had a grease smear under one eye. He looked more like a Saul than an Adalbert, grease smear or no grease smear. “Is she?” he said. “I haven’t seen enough of her lately to know. Hell, till I went back at the house I had no idea she’d been married and widowed since I, ah, left.”
“She had?” Theo said. Sarah hadn’t mentioned that at all at the zoo. “What happened?”
“British bombing raid. Got her husband and his folks. Would have got her, too, only she wasn’t home for some reason.”
“Oh,” Theo said. “Too bad.” He was spending more words than he did most of the time. But he couldn’t remember when he’d talked as much as he had at the zoo.
He could hardly remember the last time he’d spent so long in a pretty girl’s company, either, even if her brother was along, too. He’d had a few leaves in Breslau, but he hadn’t taken advantage of them that way. He wondered why not-it wasn’t as if he didn’t get the itch like any other young man. Getting it and scratching it, though, were two different things. To scratch it, he’d have to talk to a girl first, to show her what a good fellow he was. To him, that seemed somehow more intimate than lying down with her in bed.
Or it did most of the time, anyhow. “Sarah’s easy to talk to, too,” he said.
“I don’t hardly know about that, either. You were banging your gums pretty good there, though.” Adi looked at him sidewise. “So am I going to have a Hossbach in the family? My old man would like it-I’ll tell you that.”
“He would? Why? I’m a gentile.” Theo was surprised into more words yet.
“He wouldn’t care. You’re named Theodosios. Pop would care about that. You bet he would.”
He’d said that his father was a professor of ancient history. Theo hadn’t kept that in the top drawer of his mind-it had been a while ago now. But he remembered when something jogged him, sure enough. “He really wouldn’t care?” Theo asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Adi said. “Although he may feel more Volkisch now, on account of everything that’s happened lately.” He used the word so beloved of the Nazis with a sardonic twist all his own.
Theo thought that over. If people despised you because of what you believed, what would that make you do? It might make you drop your beliefs and try to seem as much like everybody else as you could. Or it might make you cling to them all the tighter. He could see going either way. If your ancestors had hung on to their beliefs in a line stretching back three thousand years, wouldn’t you be more inclined to cling tighter? Theo thought so.
“I wouldn’t blame him if he did,” Theo said. “Or Sarah.” She hadn’t acted as if she wanted to spit in his eye because he wasn’t Jewish. She might just have been polite with her brother’s Kamerad, though. How could you tell with women? Theo had enough trouble telling with men.
“Big of you,” Adi said, which made Theo’s ears heat. Adi went on, “Stick your head in here with me, will you? Something’s still screwed up with this fan linkage, but I can’t see what.”
Before long, Theo found the trouble. Machinery gave him much less trouble than people did. Machines were more predictable and less complicated. They did the same things again and again unless they broke. Then you fixed them, and they did those things some more.
People … Who could tell what people would do next? Half the time, they didn’t know themselves till they did it. A lot of the time, they didn’t know what they’d done or why, even afterwards. That was how things looked to Theo, anyway.
“Good job. Thanks,” Adi told him once he’d got the linkage back in order. “Two heads were better than one. Or yours was better than mine.”
Still uncommonly talkative, Theo said, “You’re making a good panzer commander.”
“Am I? I’m glad you think so. How come?”
“You give other people credit. Hermann did that, too.”
“He sure did. I’m trying to act like him. Not so easy-he had more patience than I do. But I am trying, and I’m trying not to be too trying, too.” Adi loosened the props and let the armored, louvered decking slam down over the engine compartment. “I’ll tell you something else, since I know damn well you don’t flap your gums too much. If I never take a panzer into combat again for the rest of my life, I’ll be the happiest guy in the world. What do you think of that?”
“Sounds good.” Theo held up his left hand to show off the finger that wasn’t there. He mimed getting shot. “Once is plenty.”
“Once is twice too often,” Adi said. Theo nodded. Adi went on, “Bad enough when we were fighting foreigners. Our own people …?” He scowled and muttered under his breath. “Yes, I know they were Nazis. Yes, I know they would have done horrible things to me if they got the chance. But they were Germans, dammit, and this isn’t exactly a Russian uniform I’m wearing.”
“Nope.” Theo couldn’t argue with that.
Adi’s chuckle would have curdled milk. “Funny, isn’t it? My father and I don’t see eye-to-eye about all kinds of things. He thinks I’m a jerk because I don’t care about the old-time stuff he’s interested in. And he couldn’t care less about football or anything like that. But we’ve both always wanted to be Germans, and to hell with the Germans who didn’t want to let us.”
“You can be now.” Theo paused and decided he needed to revise that: “Maybe you can.”
“Maybe. Uh-huh. That’s about it.” Adi didn’t sound gloomy, though. “I’ll tell you something, man. It’s a hell of a lot better deal than all the shit Hitler dumped on us.”
Theo didn’t know what to say: again, he couldn’t very well disagree. So he did what he usually did when he didn’t know what to say about something-he didn’t say anything about it. He had something else on his mind, anyway. “Adi?… Um, Saul?”
“Adi, please. We’re both more used to it. What’s up?”