“Yeah, yeah. I heard all that crap, too. You ever see ’em in action?” Pete said. “I’m telling you, those guys don’t know how to back up.”
“Hot damn,” Houlihan said. “If they don’t, we’ll teach ’em.”
The less the other guys on the ward had actually seen of the Japanese, the more certain they were that the United States would clean the clocks of Hirohito’s finest. Pete didn’t like Japs, which was putting it mildly. But anybody who didn’t think they were tough… well, as far as Pete could see, that fellow was getting too many pain shots.
You had to know your enemy. The men on his ward didn’t, and didn’t want to. Maybe that meant nothing. Pete couldn’t say for sure; he was only a lousy two-striper himself. But what if American admirals and generals had the same attitude as the men they led? That wouldn’t be so good.
He did know for a fact that the Japs were interested in everything America did. People said they only imitated. Okay-fine. Say their equipment wasn’t quite as good as the stuff Uncle Sam handed his boys. If the men using the gear were better, didn’t that wipe out the difference?
Pete was a Marine. The Marines were based on the idea that you could kick the other guy’s ass if you were meaner and faster than he was. They’d done it against the Germans in the last big wingding, and in half a dozen banana republics since. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked for them.
So why wouldn’t it work for the Japs, too? No reason at all, not that he could see. But he couldn’t explain it to the Army and Navy men who’d hurt themselves or come down sick. They believed in firepower the way Mormons believed in Joseph Smith. To them, the quality of the men holding on to the guns was just a detail.
“Okay, fine,” he said to Houlihan at last, throwing his good hand in the air. “Have it your way. I hope to God you’re right, to tell you the truth. But I’ve got news for you-if you’re wrong, we’re in deep shit.” Houlihan and the other guys laughed at him. He wished he thought it was funny, too.
Nobody was bombing Munster any more. Sarah Goldman liked that fine. Rationing went on, of course. The war was still going. If you took the newspapers seriously, it was going hotter than ever. Of course, if you took the newspapers seriously, you needed to have your head examined.
Troop trains rattled through town, all of them going from west to east. The papers said some of them held French and English soldiers on the way to Russia to help the Wehrmacht against the Bolsheviks and the Jews who ran the Soviet Union.
“I wonder how many soldiers on those trains are Jews,” Samuel Goldman said at breakfast one morning. “I wonder what they think of the orders they have.”
“Maybe some of them will…” Sarah didn’t finish the sentence. They didn’t talk about Saul and what he was doing. None of them really believed the house was bugged, not any more, but none of them believed in taking chances, either.
“Yes, maybe they will,” Father agreed now, understanding what she was saying even if she hadn’t said it. “That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Very interesting indeed.”
“It would,” she said. The idea that Saul might run into anyone with whom he didn’t have to hide what he really was drew her on like a will-o’-the-wisp. How long could you live a lie? If your other choice was dying, as long as you had to. But living the lie here also involved the risk of dying, and not a small one. Papers printed black-bordered casualty lists every day…
Father set a checked cloth cap on his head. “Away I go,” he said as he stood up from the table. “What I do won’t be very interesting, but it will remind the powers that be of my wonderful virtues and my strong back.”
He stumped toward the door. His limp was worse than it had been. Unlike Saul, he didn’t have a body made for hard physical labor every day. He should have stood in front of a classroom, chalking names and dates and Latin and Greek phrases on the blackboard. No matter what he should have done, this was what he did. It was what the Nazis made him do, and all they let him do now.
What would happen when the labor gangs ran out of work? Now that the bombs had stopped falling, wouldn’t the workers get ahead of the rubble? Sarah shook her head. She was being silly. The bosses could always keep their laborers busy, even if they had to invent work for them.
They had labor gangs full of Jewish women, too. The only reason Sarah and her mother hadn’t got dragooned into them was Samuel Goldman’s war wound. That was the kind of privilege it won: nothing to make anyone celebrate in sane times, but better than nothing when madness called the shots.
Or was it madness? The Fuhrer had an amazing knack for getting exactly what he wanted. If England and France helped him finish off Stalin, he would bestride Europe as no man had since Napoleon. And then wouldn’t he turn on them the first chance he got? How did they think they’d stop him when he did?
The day dragged along. In the late afternoon, Sarah went shopping. The Big Switch hadn’t made things any better there. Soldiers from the Western democracies might cross the German frontier, but food didn’t seem to. Hadn’t England lifted the blockade? Maybe so, but food still meant war bread and cabbage and potatoes and turnips.
She got what she could at the grocer’s, and precious little it was. A sign in his front window claimed he had plums, but they were all gone by the time Sarah and the other Jewish shoppers were allowed to buy. She would have been angrier had she been more surprised. Some of the cabbages and beets he was selling looked better than usual. Maybe the Aryan women had got so excited about the plums, they hadn’t picked over the ordinary vegetables so carefully.
Her stringbag fuller than she’d expected it to be, she crossed the street to the bakery. BRUCK’S, it said over the door. On the window was taped a faded, swastika-bedecked sign: German people! Don’t buy from Jews! Sarah smiled mirthlessly. She wasn’t a “German person.” The “Jew” stamped on her identity card proved as much.
As she’d hoped, Isidor stood behind the counter instead of his father. His face lit up when he saw her. “Hello!” There were other people in the bakery; he couldn’t say everything he might have. By the way an older woman’s eyebrow quirked, he’d said plenty with one word.
“Hi,” Sarah answered.
“What do you need today?” Isidor did his best to sound businesslike and matter-of-fact, but his best wasn’t very good.
“Two kilogram loaves,” Sarah answered, also as plainly as she could.
“Coming up.” Isidor took them off the shelf with as much ceremony as if they were fit for a king. They were plain, solid, black war bread; a king would have to get mighty hungry before he cut slices from them.
The other shoppers paid for what they’d bought and parted with ration coupons. After they left, Isidor reached under the counter. He pulled out half a dozen lovely purple plums, displaying them in the palms of his hands. “Where did you find those?” Sarah exclaimed.
“Across the street,” Isidor answered. “Old Bohm at the grocery isn’t such a bad guy. He’ll trade this for that. If we’re careful, we can get away with it.” He gave her the fruit. “Anyway, these are for you.”
“For me?” she squeaked. “No, Isidor. That’s too much!” Half a dozen plums, and she was carrying on as if he’d given her a kilo of gold. It was silly-or would have been if she weren’t what she was where she was.
“Hush,” Isidor said firmly. “I can’t get you the kinds of things I want to. They’d shoot me if I tried. Besides, nobody in Germany can get that kind of stuff nowadays except guys like Goring. So I do what I can. Today, it’s plums. Next week, who knows? Maybe even lamb shanks or something.”
He sounded a hundred percent serious. He was most of the time. Sarah had more whimsy in her. She wagged a finger at him. “Don’t you know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?” Even as she said it, she realized there were probably Jewish girls in Munster who would sell their body for half a dozen plums. The difference between bad and worse was far bigger than the difference between good and better.