“But we ain’t gonna fight about any of them,” Dave put in. Peggy nodded; it looked the same way to her.
“American freighters continue to carry trucks, tanks, planes, and other military supplies to Murmansk and Archangel,” the radio said. “No one expects anything the USSR does in Lithuania to hurt the Russian-American alliance against Tojo’s Japan.”
Peggy nodded again. Sure as hell, that sounded like the way the world worked. The little peoples, the Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians and Czechs, got the shitty end of the stick while the big countries did as they pleased. The Iroquois and Cherokees and Apaches might sympathize with the minnows on the other side of the Atlantic. They sat on reservations; their European counterparts were under martial law. And the sympathy wouldn’t do anybody any good.
“American bombers pounded Wake Island again,” Lowell Thomas said. “And fast American patrol and torpedo boats-PT boats, the Navy calls them-have raided the fringes of the Japanese Empire and inflicted damage all out of proportion to their size. Our submarine war against Japanese shipping also is producing important results.”
He could say it. People here would mostly believe it. Why not? They couldn’t very well hop aboard one of those PT boats to check for themselves. German and Russian propaganda worked the same way. Did truth lie behind the words?
When she put that question to Dave Hartman, he just said, “We’ll all find out, won’t we?” And that was about the size of that.
Kurt Poske nudged Saul Goldman. “How’d it feel to see your folks at last, Adi?” the loader asked.
“Weird. That’s the only word I can think of,” Saul answered. “I mean, I’m glad they made it through the bombings. I’m glad they’re safe. But I don’t belong there any more.”
“Huh,” Poske said, chewing on that.
Saul wished he were talking to Theo instead. Theo would understand what he was talking about: Theo didn’t fit in anywhere, either. No wonder he played goalkeeper. Kurt was too sane, too normal, to get it.
Or Saul thought so, till Poske said, “You’ve been at the front too long, is what it is.”
“That sure may be some of it,” Saul said. “Although my old man was in the trenches the last round, so he knows about that. Now he knows I know about it, too. But the big thing is, I like being a panzer man better than I liked anything I was doing when I used to live here. Even if I weren’t, ah, what I am”-even now, he had trouble saying he was a Jew-“I wouldn’t have anything going for me except this.”
“You’re not the only guy I know who talks that way,” Poske said. “Me, I want to get home. My old man’s a cabinetmaker. Well, he’s in an aircraft plant now, but that’s what he does. It’s a good trade. I did some before I got called up. I’ll be able to handle more now, maybe take over the business when my dad decides to pack it in.”
“I don’t have anything like that to go back to,” Saul said. And wasn’t that the truth! No matter how much his father wished he would, he cared nothing for ancient history. He’d learned some in spite of himself, but it didn’t do anything for him.
“You could play football,” Kurt said. “You’re good enough. You might make some real money doing that, not Wehrmacht pigeon feed.”
“For a little while, I might. Not for long. I’m already twenty-seven, so I’ve got maybe six years, tops,” Saul said. “If I tear up a knee or break an ankle, it’s all over right there. I love to play-you know that. But I can’t count on football.”
Poske’s gray eyes met Saul’s brown ones. You always thought of the loader as the dummy in a panzer crew because he had the simplest job. But Kurt, Saul realized, wasn’t such a dope after all. He said, “Can you count on the Wehrmacht? Do you still want to be a Stabsobergefreiter when you’re forty-five? Will the big shots want you in that slot then?”
“Scheisse,” Saul muttered-that was much too good a question. The Wehrmacht didn’t officially know he was a Jew, of course. But what it officially knew and what it knew were two different things. No Mischling or Jew could become even an Unteroffizier. They all topped out at the highest grade of senior private. Or they did now. Saul said, “I hope the rules will change now that the Nazis aren’t making them any more.”
“Well, there is that,” Kurt allowed. “They went overboard, no two ways about it. What could you do, though, when they’d kill you or toss you into Dachau if you complained?”
If everybody had complained, right from the start … If everyone’s clothes had sported yellow stars when Jews were ordered to wear them … But how often did human nature work that way? Most of the time, people were just glad to watch somebody else get it in the neck. That meant they weren’t. You thought of yourself first, then of your kin, and then of other folks like yourself.
You had to have an elastic soul to stretch it wider than that and think of people not much like you as your fellow human beings. Most folks’ tolerance didn’t go so wide. The Nazis weren’t dopes. They’d understood that, all right.
So Kurt wasn’t a hero and he wasn’t a martyr. Hardly anybody was. You admired those few brave people, but who wanted to imitate them? “You couldn’t do anything,” Saul said. “You always played square with me, and that was plenty.”
“Thanks, Adi.” Kurt Poske eyed him again. “That’s not even your real name, is it?”
“No, but so what?” Saul said. “By now I’m more used to it than the one I was born with.” He meant that. He’d been Adi Stoss all through the war. Trying to go back would just confuse him. Like the rest of the world, he already felt confused enough.
If they changed the rules, if they turned Jews into citizens again, they might let him become a noncom. He thought he would make a pretty fair sergeant and panzer commander one of these days. Nobody would try to push him around, that was for sure. And when he wondered what he needed to do and how to go about doing it, he could model himself on Hermann Witt.
That was funny, wasn’t it? The son of a professor of classics and ancient history hoping to become a Feldwebel and go on telling a panzer crew what to do? It would have been hysterical, not just funny, if he hadn’t thought his father would be proud of him rather than horrified.
You wanted to defend your country if it needed you. Of course, you also wanted your country to defend you if you needed it. Hitler’s Reich hadn’t done so well on that score, not if you were a Jew. The Salvation Committee was bound to do better there. It couldn’t very well do worse.
If they ever figured out that Adalbert Stoss and Saul Goldman were the same person, more than his religion might stand between him and sergeant’s rank. There was the small matter of a murder charge. Or there might be. His panzer had helped smash the Rathaus in Münster to charred rubble. If his file there hadn’t gone up in smoke, water from fire hoses might have turned it to unreadable pulp. He could hope so.
Here came a kid in black coveralls with a Schmeisser in his hands and a worried look on his face. Seeing Saul and Kurt sitting on the grass by their Panzer IV, he said, “Excuse me, but is this the machine that needs a new driver?”
“That’s right,” Saul answered. “It was my slot till our commander got shot. I didn’t know if they’d send us another sergeant or a new driver.”
“Looks like they’re gonna put you in the turret to stay, Adi,” Kurt said. “Congratulations, man.”
“Thanks,” Saul said. He turned back to the kid. “If you’re going to drive, I guess I am in charge of this traveling madhouse for a while. I’m Adi Stoss, and this other lazy bum here is Kurt Poske. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Claus Valentiner.” The new man presented his Soldbuch. The pay book showed that he was indeed a trained panzer driver, that he’d seen a little action with a unit in Belgium, that he’d come back to the Vaterland to recover from a leg wound, and such less relevant details as his gas-mask size (1-small) and blood group (B).