And if he doesn’t make eye contact and get us nervous, his odds for seeing tomorrow bump up, Tom thought.
“Okay. Now they’re out of range,” the GI said. He relaxed-fractionally.
“They wouldn’t go after just two of us…would they?” Schmidt wished he’d managed to swallow the last two words, but he knew what they said about wishes and horses.
To his relief, the PFC didn’t seem to think he was yellow. “Well, you wouldn’t think so,” the man answered seriously. “When they blow themselves up, they try to take out more than two of us at a time. But you don’t wanna drop your guard, you know? If you look like you ain’t payin’ attention, who knows what one of those cocksuckers’ll try?”
“Yeah. Who knows?” Tom’s voice sounded gloomy, even to himself.
“I’ll tell you somethin’, man,” the soldier said. “I ain’t got near enough points for them to hand me a Ruptured Duck and ship my sorry ass home-I didn’t get over here till pretty late in the game. But if they want to throw me on a boat and send me to fight the Japs, I’d sooner do that than this. That’s an honest war, anyways. You know who the bad guys are. They get in your way, you fuckin’ grease ’em. This…Truman said it was over when the Nazis signed the surrender papers, but does it look like it’s over to you?”
“Well…it did for a little while,” Tom said.
“I know. I figured this occupation shit’d be duty you could handle standing on your head.” The American broke off to give another German the once-over. She was young and kind of cute, but that wasn’t why he eyed her the way he did. As she walked off, he sighed and spat in the rubble. “Standing on your goddamn head. Yeah, sure. And then you wake up.”
“Have you heard of any women blowing themselves up?” Tom asked.
“There was one, a coupla weeks ago. Down near…where the fuck was it? It was in Stars and Stripes-you can look it up. Down near Augsburg, that’s where the cunt did it.”
Tom asked one more question: “So if you had your druthers, what would you do with the Germans now?”
“Beats me, man,” the GI said. “Way it looks to me is, we either gotta kill ’em all or else walk away from ’em. Neither one of those is what you’d call a real good answer.”
“I know,” Tom said.
“You got any better ones?” the soldier asked. “You can go all over the place. You ain’t stuck yakking with guys like me-you can talk to officers and shit. Hell, you can even talk to the krauts if you want to, huh?” He made that sound as strange as talking to Martians. To him, maybe it was.
“I could, yeah. If I did, I don’t know how many folks back in Milwaukee’d want to read about it, though.” Tom held up a hand. “And before you ask me, I haven’t run into any officers with ideas much different from yours.”
“Jeez.” The PFC spat again, mournfully. “We are fubar’d, then. But good.”
Soviet troops shouted orders-in Russian. The Germans they were herding onto trains mostly didn’t understand. The Germans weren’t happy to be in the train station to begin with. The Soviets had hauled them out of their houses and flats and shacks and tents and wherever else they were staying. Some Germans carried a duffel’s worth of worldly goods. More had only the clothes on their backs.
“Where are we going?” “Where are they taking us?” “What’s going on?” “What are they doing?” Germans called out the questions again and again. Hardly any of the soldiers understood. Nobody answered.
Watching the chaos unfold, Vladimir Bokov smiled. The NKVD officer had no trouble following the Germans’ worried questions. In broad outline, he knew the answers to them. But he kept his mouth shut. He was there to observe, not to ease the Germans’ minds. His smile got broader. What he could say wouldn’t make these people feel any better.
A train pulled in. Soviet soldiers already aboard opened the cars’ doors. An indignant German voice rose above the general din: “Was ist hier los? Some of these cars are for transporting freight or-or livestock, not human beings!”
He was right, not that it did him any good. The troops started herding-and then cramming-people onto the train. Men shouted. Women screamed. Children wailed. That did them no good, either.
The NKVD colonel standing next to Bokov chuckled nastily. “Let the pricks find out what it’s like, eh? Not like they didn’t do it to plenty of other people.”
“That’s right, Comrade,” Bokov agreed. No need to worry that Colonel Moisei Shteinberg would prove disloyal to the Soviet state, not when it came to dealing with the Hitlerites. Lots of Jews in the old Russian Empire became revolutionaries because the Tsars mistreated their people. Well, what the Tsars did to Jews was like a kiss on the cheek compared to what the Nazis gave them.
That angry German man protested again, crying, “This is inhumane!” Then a grinning soldier who doubtless understood not a word he said shoved him into a cattle car. The Red Army men forced more and more Germans in after him.
“Why are you doing this to us?” a woman asked the soldier who was pushing her into another car. “Where are we going?”
Bokov would have bet rubles against rocks that the soldier didn’t follow her questions. The fellow had swarthy skin, high cheekbones, and dark, slanted Asian eyes. He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “Suck my cock, bitch!” he said. Luckily for the woman, she didn’t understand him, either. She squawked when he put both hands on her backside to get her in there. He only laughed.
In slow, schoolboy Russian, a German man said, “For what you do? I not harm you.”
He was over sixty, so he might have been telling the truth, at least in the literal sense of the words. Maybe he hadn’t carried a Mauser or served a 105mm howitzer. But even if he hadn’t, he’d almost certainly made weapons or munitions or uniforms or something else the Nazis had used against the USSR. Not many people here had clean hands.
The soldier he addressed didn’t answer him in words, not at first. Instead, the Red Army man hit him in the side of the head with the stock of his submachine gun. The German crumpled with a moan. The Red Army man kicked him in the ribs. Then he shouted, “Fuck yourself in the mouth! Get up, you stupid, ugly prick!”
Slowly, the old German did. He had a hand clutched to his temple. Blood rilled out between his fingers and ran down his cheek. “Why have you done that?” he choked out. “Not understand.”
“I ought to kill you, is what I ought to do. I ought to gutshoot you,” the Soviet soldier said. “You didn’t harm me, you lying sack of shit? Who the fuck shot me?” He pointed to one arm, then to the other leg. “Who burned down the kolkhoz where I grew up? Who raped my sister and shot her afterwards? Was it the Americans? Or was it you Heil, Hitler! bastards?”
How much of that did the stupid old German get? Here, for once, Bokov was tempted to translate. The losers needed to hear stuff like this. They’d see what they bought when they invaded the USSR four years ago. And they’d see plenty of other things, too-for as long as they lasted.
More and more people kept going into the cars. It was almost like a comic turn in a film. When it ran in reverse after the train got to wherever it was going, how many people would come out alive? Fewer than had gone in-he was sure of that. The idea didn’t break his heart.
He turned to Colonel Shteinberg. “How well do you think this will work, sir?”
“Well, we shook up the Baltic republics as if we were stirring soup,” the Jew answered. “Anybody who might have been anti-Soviet, away he went. Or she went-we shipped out plenty of Baltic bitches, too.” He chuckled reminiscently; maybe he’d been involved in that. But then the grin faded. “We could ship as many loyal Russians back in as we needed-the Baltics are legally part of the USSR now. We can’t do that so well here.”