A skinny peasant with white whiskers stared suspiciously at Sergeant Ivan Kuchkov. He seemed to be the only male in the Ukrainian village except for an equally scrawny rooster. He was too old to have fought in the last war, and probably too old to have fought the Japanese. He looked old enough to have marched to war against the Ottoman Turks a generation before that.
Where were all the younger men who’d lived here? In the Red Army? Carrying rifles with some anti-Soviet guerrilla band? Kuchkov glowered at Comrade Whiskers. “We need bread,” he growled.
“What?” The ancient cupped a hand behind his ear. “What’s that you say?” He was trying to speak Russian, not Ukrainian, but making heavy going of it. He’d probably had it beaten into him in the Tsar’s army, all right, and not used it much once they finally turned him loose.
“Bread!” Kuchkov yelled. “Food! Something to eat, you dumb, senile, cocksucking cunt.”
“Yob tvoyu mat’,” the old man said, very clearly. Fuck your mother.
Ivan started to draw back a fist to knock the old fart’s block off. Before he swung, though, he started to laugh. He laughed so hard, he had to hold his belly. “All right-you’ve got balls,” he allowed. “But we still fucking well need to eat. So where’s the bread?”
“What?” The old guy cupped a hand behind his ear again.
Chances were he heard well enough. He just didn’t feel like coughing up whatever the village happened to have. These people had lived through Stalin’s famine in the thirties, after all. They wouldn’t be jumping up and down to help the Red Army.
Well, too bad for them. Kuchkov rounded on a stout babushka standing a couple of paces behind the man with the white beard. She was no spring chicken, either, but she didn’t have as many kilometers on her as he did. “C’mon, Granny,” Ivan said in what were meant for coaxing tones. “You can make it easy, or you can make it tough.”
Granny looked death at him out of granite-gray eyes. Ivan didn’t believe in witches, but that hate-filled stare tempted him to change his mind. The babushka gave forth with a stream of Ukrainian dialect nobody from more than a day’s walk away from this miserable hole in the ground could possibly have understood.
“Talk Russian, you stinking bitch,” Ivan snarled.
She did: she told him to fuck his mother, too. It wasn’t so funny the second time around. He knocked her down. He could have done worse. Unslinging his machine pistol warned that he might. Slowly, she got to her feet. The other villagers’ gaze swung from her to Kuchkov and back again.
“Last chance, assholes,” Ivan said in his slowest, clearest Russian. “Cough up or we’ll go through this shitty dump ourselves and clean you out good.”
The villagers looked at the Red Army men at his back. Then they started producing loaves of black bread, small crocks of lard, and larger crocks of borscht and pickled cabbage. The whiskery man said, “If you are on our side, no wonder so many here like the Germans better.” He was too old to bother hiding his bitterness.
But he only made Ivan laugh some more. “What I just gave you is a kiss next to what you’d get from the Nazis, you stupid, drippy prick,” he said. “First they’d take everything you’ve got-and I mean every fucking thing. Then they’d burn every shanty in this pisspot place to the ground. And then they’d shoot everybody here, except the two cunts who aren’t too goddamn ugly to fuck. And they’d shoot them, too, once they got the clap from them.”
He wasn’t kidding. He’d seen villages the Hitlerites had been through. It must have shown in his voice, because the old man’s rheumy eyes blinked-slowly, like a lizard’s. All he answered was, “You say this,” but his own disbelief was less absolute than it might have been.
“Fucking straight I say it, Comrade,” Ivan answered. “If you aren’t so lucky, you’ll find out for yourself.”
He and his men settled down to eat. He didn’t worry about what the villagers would think as they watched the soldiers go through the supplies they’d taken. If the peasants kicked up a fuss, he’d show them exactly what the Nazis did to a village. His superiors wouldn’t give him any grief about it. They’d figure the locals had it coming-especially if he didn’t leave any survivors to argue about how things happened.
Some of his men thought more than two girls in the village looked good enough to go after. Not surprisingly, the soldiers got what they wanted. Saying no was liable to be a-what did they call it? — a capital offense. And once the Red Army men’s lust was slaked, they felt mellow enough to let the girls share some of what was really their food to begin with.
From each according to his abilities-hers, too, Kuchkov thought. To each according to his need. The Red Army men had needed pussy and chow. The villagers supplied both. Maybe Karl Marx wouldn’t have approved of the shape the transaction took. Ivan didn’t care, though he’d sooner have jumped on a grenade than let the politruk even suspect that. As far as he was concerned, Marx was just some kike from Germany.
He did make sure he set sentries all around the village before his section sacked out for the night. He made sure the rotation consisted of solid, reliable guys who wouldn’t drink themselves blind. He wasn’t worried about the Nazis. As far as he knew, the pricks in the coal-scuttle helmets weren’t close.
If the villagers slithered out and went wailing to the Ukrainian nationalist bandits, though, that might not be such a whole bunch of fun. The Nazis clumped around, especially at night. They might beat you, but they probably wouldn’t catch you by surprise.
Those nationalist bandits, though, knew the countryside better than Ivan and his buddies did. You didn’t want to wake up and try breathing through a throat some funny-talking bastard had just slit. Forewarned was forestalled. Nobody sneaked out of the place, and nobody sneaked in to avenge the village girls’ virtue, assuming they’d ever had any.
Things heated up the next morning. Off to the west, German and Soviet big guns started going at each other for all they were worth. Ivan cocked his head to one side, gauging the way the artillery duel was going. Except it wasn’t going. It was coming this way.
“Dig, you cocksuckers!” he shouted to his men. “Dig like you’re moles going after a kopek you dropped somewhere!”
His own entrenching tool made the Ukraine’s black earth fly. Nothing would save you from a direct hit, but you could protect yourself against anything short of that pretty damn quick. His soldiers worked hard at their holes, too. The villagers gawped at them. They’d never seen anybody work so hard-so their eyes said.
Then the shellbursts started. At first the enemy rounds came down near the western edges of the fields, a couple of kilometers away. But they walked forward with Germanic precision and thoroughness. Some of the villagers jumped into their huts. Some tried to run off to the east.
Too late for either of those to do much good, though. Artillery scared ground-pounders worse than anything else. It caused more casualties than rifles and machine guns put together. And you couldn’t hurt the sons of bitches who were slaughtering you. They sat there a few kilometers behind the line, eating sausage and swatting girls on the ass. Every so often, one of them would pull a lanyard and blow up some more guys who never did anything to them. That was how it seemed to infantrymen, anyhow.
The village was in flames by the time the shelling eased off. The old fart who hadn’t wanted to feed the Russian soldiers lay dead in front of a wrecked shack, gutted like a mutton carcass. A babushka held him in her arms and wailed.