His mother saw the amazement on his face, but didn’t understand why it was there. “It’s the war,” she said apologetically. “Nothing’s been the way it ought to be since those filthy Japs jumped us.”
Chaim wondered if she’d ever seen a Japanese man in her life. There were some in New York City, but not many. But that wasn’t why he dropped the duffel on the sidewalk (butts everywhere-not many folks here needed to scrounge them) and laughed till he had to hold his sides. It was either laugh or cry. Laughing felt better.
It did to him, anyhow. Ruth Weinberg looked mad. “I said maybe something funny?” she asked, her voice sharp.
“Yeah, you did, Ma. Sorry, but you did,” Chaim answered. “If this looks bad to you … This is so much better than anything I saw in Spain, I don’t know how to tell you. Now I believe all the stories you guys tell about the shtetls, on account of I’ve seen that kind of stuff myself.”
“So why did you go over there, then?” his mother said.
“Because the Republic was fighting the kind of mamzrim who start pogroms, that’s why,” Chaim said. “Because now Spain is free.” That was the simplest way to put it. He didn’t talk about reeducation camps, or about his suspicion that he would have wound up in one if he’d stayed in the Republic much longer.
“What will you do now that you’re back?” his father asked as they went down the steps to the trains.
“I dunno. Whatever I can find.” Chaim worried about it not in the least. In a land like this, dripping with milk and money, he was sure he’d manage something.
When word of the peace with Germany reached the Ukraine, Ivan Kuchkov figured they would do one of two things with him. Either they’d toss him him out of the Red Army and ship him back to his collective farm or they’d put him on the Trans-Siberian Railway and turn him loose against the Japanese. Now that the Fritzes were old news, the fight against the little yellow monkeys was warming up again.
But no. They had something else in mind. His regiment had gone east, all right, but not very far east. They were still this side of Kiev, combing the countryside for Ukrainian nationalist bandits. The Ukrainian rats had jumped straight into bed with the Nazis, hoping to use them to pay back the Soviet government for starving their country into collectivization.
Now the Nazis were gone. Even the stupid Germans couldn’t stomach them any more. But the bandits, or some of them, kept fighting. They had their reasons for hating the Red Army. And they knew they’d get forever in the gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck if they gave up, so what did they have to lose by going down rifle in hand?
“Fuck me if I wouldn’t sooner take on those Hitlerite pricks,” Kuchkov complained after a nasty skirmish with the Banderists. “When they got in trouble, they retreated. These pussies, you’ve got to kill ’em.”
“And they’re trying to kill you till you do,” Sasha Davidov agreed mournfully. He had a bandage on his right forearm. It was only a graze, but you didn’t want to make even a nodding acquaintance with somebody else’s bullet.
“Too goddamn right, they are.” Ivan muttered more obscenities under his breath. He had the bad feeling he knew why his regiment had drawn this stinking, dangerous duty. Someone who could give orders that moved units around was still working on paying them back for plugging that political officer.
He glanced over at Davidov. The little Jew looked back. His shoulders went up and down in a small shrug, as if to say What can you do? Ivan already knew what he could do: not a goddamn thing. He couldn’t even complain to Lieutenant Obolensky. If he did, the company commander would tell him They’re screwing me the same way they’re screwing you. And he’d be right.
Go over the lieutenant’s head? What a joke! Anyone with fancier shoulder boards would tell him Shut up and soldier, soldier! That had only one answer: I serve the Soviet Union!
If I serve the Soviet Union! was all you could say, no point to complaining in the first place. Besides, if he talked to anybody of higher rank than Obolensky, the Chekists would hear about it. Yes, this was a nasty duty. Yes, no one in the blue that was the NKVD’s arm-of-service color would shed a tear if a bandit put one through his brisket.
But they could find worse things to do with him-and to him-if he kicked up a fuss. Right now, they figured he wasn’t worth the trouble. If he made them change their minds … He didn’t want to find out what would happen then.
And so, the next morning, his section combed through the riverside woods again, flushing out Banderists. The bandits were in the woods, all right, in them and well dug in there. Had they been Germans, the Red Army would have pasted the woods with a few dozen Katyushas and then sent in troops to scrape up the stunned survivors.
They were only Banderists, though. Nobody who could order up the rockets wanted to waste them on worthless Ukrainians. The regiment got to clean them out the hard way, the old-fashioned way, then. If some soldiers got killed taking care of it, well, you could always find more soldiers.
The bandits fought with a motley mix of Nazi and Soviet weapons. They had an MG-34, but fired it only in short bursts. Ivan guessed they were low on 7.92mm cartridges. They wouldn’t get any more from the Fritzes. Once what they had was gone, it was gone for good.
They had to know they were licked. Without the Nazis to help them out and to distract the Red Army, they hadn’t a prayer of winning. They stayed in their foxholes and fought it out anyway. Some of them stayed quiet till the Red Army men went past them, then shot their enemies in the back. The Russians had used that trick against the Hitlerites whenever they could. Seeing it turned against them wasn’t so much fun.
“Give it up, you fools!” Sasha Davidov shouted to the Ukrainians. “All you’ll do is die here.”
“Suck my dick, you Communist whore!” a Banderist yelled back. Yes, they knew what they were doing. They knew why they were doing it. They were bound to know it was hopeless, too. They went ahead and did it anyhow. That made them very brave or very stupid, depending on how you looked at things.
The Red Army men took only a couple of prisoners. One of the Banderists actually gave up-he decided he would rather die slowly than all at once. Kuchkov’s men found the other guy behind a tree with a wound in the shoulder and another in the side.
“If you feel like doing me a favor, you’ll finish me off and not let the Chekists get their claws in me,” the Ukrainian said in his accented Russian.
“I will if you want,” Kuchkov said-he had no more use for the NKVD than he did for the Banderists. “Fuck your mother, are you sure?”
“Fuck you in the mouth, I sure am, Red,” the injured man replied. “I hurt like a son of a bitch. Might as well get it over with.”
A short burst from the PPD gave him what he wanted. One of the men in Ivan’s section must have said something about it to Lieutenant Obolensky, because the company commander took Ivan aside and said, “Are you sure you should have killed that bandit?”
“You mean the wounded prick? Fuck yes, Comrade Lieutenant! He was shot a couple of times. I hope some whore would do that for me if I asked him to. Even the Hitlerites’d put a sorry bastard out of his misery sometimes.”
Speaking carefully, Obolensky replied, “I hope it doesn’t get back to State Security that you killed the Banderist to keep him from telling them whatever he knew.”
“Oh.” Ivan considered that, but not for long. Then he laughed. “Fuck ’em all, you know? They can already drop on me because of Vitya and the politruk. If the cunts do, they do. Nichevo, right?”