“My people already don’t like me because of who my father is,” Sofia replied. “You, though, you’re different. What would your mother say if she found out who I was?”
His mother disapproved of everything that had anything to do with sex. She’d warned him about women before he had any idea what she was talking about. He was sometimes amazed he’d ever been born. His father must have been very persuasive one night-or just too horny to take no for an answer.
“I’m a big boy now,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about that any more.”
“Fine.” Sofia found a new place to stick in the needle: “What would your commanding officer say, then?”
“He teased me about having a girlfriend before I set out for Bialystok,” Rudel answered. “I just hoped he was right.”
She gave him a crooked smile. “What? You weren’t sure you could sweep me off my feet?”
“I don’t think anybody’s ever sure of anything with you,” he answered truthfully.
“I hope not.” Sofia took that as a matter of course-and as a matter of pride. “When people are sure about you, things get boring.”
Hans-Ulrich could imagine the two of them parting a lot of different ways. Heading the list was one-which hardly mattered-clanging the other in the ear with a frying pan. Other filmworthy melodramas also stood high up there. Getting bored with each other lay way down below something like being separated in an attack by flying orangutans.
He could imagine her finding a German protector useful. Poles didn’t love the Jews who made up a tenth of their country’s population. Perhaps because they had so many Jews, no laws restricting them were on the books here. The Reich had such laws, of course. Maybe Sofia feared they would come to Poland, too, and hoped a German could help her escape their bite. And maybe she was right in both fear and hope.
That might account for her taking a German into her bed. But what accounted for her taking a particular German, one Hans-Ulrich Rudel? He didn’t ask her. He had a fear of his own: that she might tell him the exact and literal truth. Whatever her reasons were, he was glad she had them. Glad and more than glad…
“Again?” she said as he began to rise to the occasion. “I’m going to have to put some new minerals in your mineral water, I swear I am.” But she didn’t push him away or tell him no. Her arms closed around him, her lips met his, and he wished his furlough could last forever.
Like most of the men in his division, Willi Dernen came from the Breslau Wehrkreis -near the Polish border. He knew a handful of Polish words, most of them foul. Till this campaign, though, he’d never crossed the frontier. He hadn’t even fought in Czechoslovakia; his outfit had guarded the Reich ’s western border against a French attack that never really materialized. A good thing, too. If the froggies had hit hard, they would have cracked the undermanned German defenses like a man breaking the shell on his breakfast soft-boiled egg.
And now Frenchmen and Tommies would help the Wehrmacht smash Stalin’s so-called workers’ paradise. Life-and who was diddling whom at any given moment-could get very strange sometimes.
Minsk, now, wasn’t in Poland. Up until recently, it had been the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Now it was where the Germans reorganized before sending units new to the east up to the fighting front. A lot of Jews and Red officials had fled the place before the Germans and Poles broke in. The Russians and White Russians who remained seemed resigned to the town’s sudden change of overlords. The Poles in the population seemed delighted. They flew Polish flags, white over red, at any excuse or none.
Willi watched German engineers cart away larger than life-sized bronze statues of Lenin and Stalin. That wasn’t just to show the locals that Minsk was under new management. There had to be at least a tonne of bronze in each statue. Germany was chronically short of raw materials. Pretty soon Vladimir and Josef would get shot back at the Ivans.
Even Corporal Baatz laughed when Willi remarked on that. Awful Arno hadn’t been as awful as usual, at least not to Willi. He had to inflict his Schrechlichkeit on the replacements who filled out the company, and that took up most of his time and bad temper.
The bulk of the replacements also came from Wehrkreis VIII. The Wehrmacht tried to keep men from the same part of the country in the same outfit. It helped units hold together, and anything that did that looked good to the men who gave orders. If you’d gone to school with one of the new guys, or maybe with a cousin of his, you’d try harder to keep him in one piece, and he’d do the same for you. That was the idea, anyway.
Unfortunately, the high foreheads who’d come up with the idea had never heard of Arno Baatz. He was doing his best to make sure that all the replacements, regardless of which Wehrkreis they came from, hated his guts. And his best, as Willi had too much reason to know, was pretty goddamn good.
His latest target was a new Gefreiter named Adam Pfaff. The fellow was new to the company, that is; a wound badge and a slightly gimpy left leg showed he’d been around the block before. He seemed a good soldier. Normally, even Awful Arno would have had trouble finding something for which he could pick on him.
Normally. But, for reasons of his own, Pfaff had painted his rifle dark gray. The job couldn’t have been neater. But Arno Baatz had never before seen anybody who carried a dark gray rifle. Like any other monkey, he made fun of the unfamiliar without even thinking about whether he ought to. He gaped and pointed and growled, “What the hell are you doing with that stupid thing? You aim to paint polka dots on it next?”
“No, Corporal.” The calm way Pfaff answered made Willi guess he’d got grief from noncoms before. He patted the Feldgrau sleeve of his uniform tunic. “They make our clothes this color on account of it’s hard to see. I figured I’d fix my Mauser up to match. It doesn’t do any harm.”
“It looks stupid,” Awful Arno said, by which he meant It had better not still be gray the next time I see it.
“It doesn’t do any harm,” Pfaff repeated, by which he meant Fuck you.
There were plenty of things Arno Baatz didn’t understand, but he got that, all right. His plump cheeks turned the color of iron in a blacksmith’s forge. “Oh, yeah?” he ground out. “Well, let’s just see what Major Schmitz has to say about that.” He deployed the heavy artillery. Major Heinrich Schmitz commanded not just the company but the whole battalion.
But the barrage failed to obliterate Pfaff. “Fine with me,” he answered easily. “He’s already seen it. He told me he thought it was a pretty good idea.”
“Whaaat?” Baatz stretched the word out to unnatural length. “You expect me to believe that shit? I’m gonna go talk to him right this minute, and if I find out you’re lying-no, when I find out you’re lying-your sorry ass is mine.” Off he stormed, gloating anticipation splashed all over his face.
Pfaff lit a cigarette. “Boy, that was fun,” he said to no one in particular. Then, catching Willi’s eye, he asked, “Is that arselick always that bad?”
“Nah.” Willi shook his head.
“That’s good,” the other Gefreiter said. “Must be on the rag or something, huh?”
Willi shook his head again. He hadn’t finished yet. Now he did: “A lot of the time, Awful Arno’s worse.”
“About the third time I’ve heard people call him that,” Pfaff said with a thin chuckle. “Everybody must love him to death.”
“To death is right,” Willi answered, rolling his eyes. “He’s not yellow or anything like that, I will say. When the shooting starts, he’s all right to have at your elbow. Any other time… It’s like you said. He’s the biggest asshole left unwiped.”
He wanted to ask Pfaff whether he’d been bullshitting when he told Baatz Major Schmitz had given his imprimatur to the gray rifle. But he held his peace. As far as he was concerned, it was everybody in the world against Awful Arno. You didn’t want to let on that you had doubts about someone on your own side. Not only that, but he’d also find out for himself, one way or the other, pretty damn soon.