“What am I going to do?” Sarah said.
She knew what she’d do for the next little while: she’d stay with her parents, the way she had before navigating the shoals of Nazi bureaucracy to win permission to marry Isidor. All that work, all that tsuris-for what? For nothing. For a bomb howling down out of the sky and killing some Jews who hated Hitler but weren’t allowed to use shelters along with the Reich’s Aryan citizens.
Father looked around. Seeing no one within earshot, he spoke in an even lower voice than Mother had used a moment before: “The Nazis are our misfortune.”
No wonder he made sure nobody could overhear him! How many times had Hitler pounded his lectern and thundered The Jews are our misfortune!? More often than Sarah could count, anyhow. If someone heard one of those Jews mocking his slogan, what would happen to the scoffer? A beating? A trip to Dachau? A bullet in the back of the head? Something along those lines. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.
Mother clucked reproachfully. “Watch yourself, Samuel,” she said.
“Oh, I do,” he replied. “If I didn’t, our misfortune would already have happened to me.” The professor of classics and ancient history turned street repairman corrected himself with his usual precision: “More of our misfortune would have happened to me, I should say.”
None of that answered Sarah’s question, of course. Yes, it had been only two days since the air raid. As usual, Jews got their dead into the ground as fast as they could. Then something else occurred to her: “Gevalt! What will any of us do for bread now?”
“We’ll probably do without, that’s what,” Samuel Goldman said, and he was much too likely to be right. The Brucks’ bakery had been the only one in Munster from which Jews were allowed to buy any. Would the authorities let them visit an Aryan establishment because they had no other choice? Or would the brownshirts declare that it was their own fault the bakery got bombed?
“I can bake bread,” Mother said, but with no great enthusiasm. And who could blame her for that? Baking every day from scratch was a devil of a lot of work. It wasn’t as if she had lots of time on her hands, or as if she weren’t worn out already.
“They’ll probably set you to doing it without yeast, and tell me to make bricks without straw.” One of Father’s eyebrows quirked upward toward his graying hair. “My guess is, they would have done it a long time ago if they weren’t so allergic to the Old Testament. I mean, those are tried and true things to make Jews do.”
“God was the One Who made us bake without yeast. It wasn’t Pharaoh,” Mother pointed out.
“Well, what if it wasn’t?” Father returned. “You don’t think Hitler thinks he’s God-and expects his good little Aryans to think so, too?”
A tram rattled past. It needed paint. One of the iron wheels clicked against the track as it went round and round. Repairs weren’t coming any time soon, not with the war on. Sarah wasted no time worrying about that-or about getting on the tram. The motorman would have thrown her and her folks off the trolley had they tried. The yellow star made it easy for Aryans to follow laws against Jews to the letter.
In normal times, in sane times, Sarah would have had a claim on some of Isidor’s estate. But facing Nazi bureaucrats again was too revolting for her even to think about, much less to do. If David Bruck’s brother wanted to take them on, he was welcome to whatever he could pry out of them.
“All that time with Isidor-it might as well never have happened,” she said in slow wonder. “He’s-gone.” She still wore her wedding ring. That and a little bit of dirt on her hand from where she’d tossed earth into the grave were almost the only signs she’d ever been married.
To her surprise, her mother shook her head. “You loved him, and that changed you, too,” Hanna Goldman said. “Love is never wasted. You should always cherish it when you find it, because you never find it often enough.”
“Listen to your mother.” Samuel Goldman sounded serious to the point of solemnity. “More truth in that than in Plato and Aristotle and both Testaments all lumped together.”
Was there? Sarah had no idea. Right now, she had no idea about anything. She didn’t even know how much she’d truly loved Isidor. Not so much as she should have-she was pretty sure of that. He hadn’t swept her off her feet: nowhere close. He’d never been a sweeping-off kind of guy. She’d liked him. She’d cared about him. She’d enjoyed the things he did when no one else was around, and she’d liked doing such things for him.
Did all that add up to love? One more thing she didn’t have the faintest idea about. What she knew was, she wouldn’t get the chance to find out now, not with Isidor she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even have a child to remember him by-one more thing of which she was no longer in any doubt. When you got right down to the bottom of things, life was pretty rotten, wasn’t it?
Very little that Aristide Demange had seen in Russia impressed him. Very little that the veteran lieutenant had seen anywhere impressed him. He made a point of not being impressed. He’d done it for so long, it was second nature to him by now.
You couldn’t help noticing Russia’s vastness, though, even if you made your point of doing no more than noticing. You couldn’t help noticing the fine tanks Russian factories turned out, either. Nor could you help noticing the frigid con of a winter Russia had. Well, hell, even Napoleon had noticed the Russian winter, though chances were he’d also done his goddamnedest not to let it impress him.
And you couldn’t help noticing what a pack of thumb-fingered oafs the Ivans were. Half the time, they didn’t know what to do with all those fancy tanks. Their tactics would have had to loosen up to seem rigid. They drank like swine. Of course, if Demange had had leaders like theirs, he would have drunk that way himself.
So here was Murmansk. Murmansk had but one raison d’etre: to get men and things into and out of Russia the year around. Thanks to the last gasp of the Gulf Stream as it slid past the northern tip of Scandinavia, the local harbor never iced up. It was the only port in the USSR that could make such a boast.
But it was at best tenuously connected to the rest of the country. A single rickety rail line led down to Leningrad and ultimately to Moscow. Odds were no one knew how many men had died building that line during the last war, or how many perished every year keeping it usable. If anyone did know, he worked for the NKVD and didn’t care. Demange had seen labor gangs of scrawny prisoners laying fresh ties under the watchful gaze of guards with submachine guns.
Murmansk itself was ugly as a toadstool. Wood huts housed the people who worked by the harbor. Wood smoke and coal smoke hovered over the town in a choking haze London would have envied. Except for fish pulled fresh from the Arctic Ocean, the food was bad and there wasn’t enough of it.
He hadn’t got away from the war, either. The Germans knew what Murmansk meant to the Ivans. Their bombers flew out of Norway through the long winter nights and pummeled the harbor and the rest of the city. Russian fighters buzzed overhead. Russian antiaircraft guns yammered away whenever the Luftwaffe came from the west. Russian papers claimed whole squadrons of He-111s and Ju-88s hacked out of the sky. French-speaking Russian officials delighted in translating those stories for any Frenchman who would sit still and listen.
Demange knew bullshit when he heard it. He also knew he was liable to end up floating in the cold, cold water if he gave forth with his opinions. He assumed anyone who knew French had to work for the NKVD. He smiled and nodded in the right places. Hypocrisy lubricated human affairs here, as it did so often.
Getting into Murmansk had been an adventure punctuated by Stukas. Getting back to la belle France was liable to be an adventure punctuated by U-boats. A torpedo was the kind of thing that could ruin a troopship’s whole day. And spring was in the calendar.