Plenty of those flew over Stockholm. Maybe the Swedes were sending Germany a message: if you jump us, we'll fight harder than the Norwegians. Or maybe they were whistling in the dark. They certainly seemed serious. Men in rather old-fashioned uniforms and odd helmets positioned antiaircraft guns on top of buildings and in parks and anywhere else that offered a wide field of fire.
Peggy figured out the placement for herself. She needed no one to explain it to her. And when she realized what was going on, she went out and got drunk. She'd seen too goddamn much of war. She was starting to understand how it worked, the way she could follow a baseball game back in the States.
She woke the next morning with a small drop-forging plant pounding away behind her eyes. Aspirins and coffee-real coffee, not horrible German ersatz!-dulled the ache without killing it. Instead of going out and acting touristy, she went back to her room and holed up with the Herald-Trib.
The war news in the paper was often several days old: it had to clear God knew how many censors, get to Paris, get printed, and get to Stockholm before she read it. She turned on the massive radio that sat in a corner of the room. She wanted fresher stories. If things in Norway calmed down-no matter who won-she was six hours by air from London. And if pigs had wings…
"BBC first," she said. The English sometimes stretched the truth in their broadcasts. They didn't jump up and down and dance on it the way Berlin did. Or she hadn't caught them at it, anyhow, which might not be the same thing.
It was a few minutes before the top of the hour. She put up with the music till the news came on. The Nazis, who hated jazz, wouldn't broadcast it. The English thought they could play it themselves, and insisted on trying. Most of the results argued against them.
Then the music went away, so she could stop sneering at the poor sap who imagined he could make a sax wail. Without preamble, the announcer said, "Reports of a coup d'etat against Adolf Hitler continue to trickle out of Germany."
"Jesus H. Christ!" Peggy exploded.
"Military leaders, dissatisfied with the course the war has taken, are said to have attempted to overthrow the Fuhrer," the suave, Oxford-inflected voice continued. "Whether the coup has succeeded is unknown outside the Reich, as are Hitler's whereabouts and fate. Nor does anyone but the disaffected generals as yet have the faintest notion of how, or whether, they will continue the war in the event they do succeed in overthrowing the German dictator."
"Son of a bitch!" Peggy added, in case her first exclamation hadn't been heartfelt enough.
"In the meanwhile, the fight continues," the BBC man continued. "Anglo-French forces have made new gains against the Wehrmacht north of Paris, while French sources indicate that their armies also continue their drive to the northeast that began east of the capital city. In the fighting in Poland, the two sides' claims and counterclaims appear irreconcilable. The situation there, accordingly, remains in doubt."
Peggy knew what that meant. The Russians were lying just as hard as the Germans and the Poles. "And they said it couldn't be done!" she said. She was mad at the Reds for losing their grip on Vladivostok. One more thing that conspired against her going home.
As if reading her thoughts, the newsreader went on, "Fighting in the Far East is similarly confused. The only things that can be stated with certainty are that the Trans-Siberian Railway remains cut in eastern Siberia, and that Vladivostok is still in Soviet hands. His Majesty's government has offered to mediate in this conflict, but the Empire of Japan unfortunately declined."
Of course England wanted to mediate. If the Russians weren't fighting Japan, they could throw their full weight against Germany. But London couldn't insist. How long would Hong Kong and Malaya last if Japan went to war against England? People said Singapore was the greatest fortress in the world, but people said all kinds of things that turned out not to be true.
Then there were the Dutch East Indies, which had to be upside down and inside out now that Germany had occupied Holland. And how much attention could France give to Indochina with a war right in her lap? England had excellent reasons for not wanting to antagonize the Japs. The only question was, would Japan head south regardless of what England did?
If Japan chose to jump that way, what would America do? There were the Philippines, way the hell out in the western Pacific. Could U.S. forces there make life difficult for the little yellow men? Peggy thought so. What was the point of holding on to land like that if you weren't going to use it?
"In British news, Prime Minister Chamberlain has named Winston Churchill the new Minister of War," the broadcaster said. "The P.M. praised Churchill's dedication and steadfastness. Churchill himself said, 'Let the Hun do his worst. We shall do our best, and God defend the right.'"
"Wow!" Peggy said. Chamberlain didn't talk like that-he talked like a greengrocer with too much education. If England had had somebody who talked like that from the minute Hitler started getting cute, maybe the war never would have got off the ground. She hoped it would go better now. CABBAGE. Potatoes. Turnips. A little sour cheese. A Jewish supper in Munster: no damn good, and not enough, either. Sarah Goldman was ashamed of the way she gobbled up her portion. She knew how bad it was, but that didn't seem to matter. Her body demanded fuel. If poor fuel was all it could get, she'd make the most of that.
Her father got more than she did. He worked harder than she did, too. There wasn't much between his skin and his bones these days, but what there was was all gristle and tough, stringy muscle. He was somewhere between the best shape of his life and starvation.
He inhaled his supper. Afterwards, he rolled a cigarette from the tobacco in his pouch. It was tobacco scavenged from fag ends picked up on the street. Before the war, only poor people would have scrounged like that. Now the ones who did were mostly Jews, because the Nazis had cut off their tobacco rations.
Samuel Goldman didn't seem to mind. After a couple of puffs, he remarked, "My gang was fixing a bomb crater just fifty meters or so down the street from Wehrkreis headquarters this afternoon."
"And?" Sarah asked. He wouldn't have used a gambit like that for no reason-he had a story to tell.
"And part of me was wishing the bomb would have come down on the headquarters," he said. The recruiters there wouldn't let him and Saul join the Wehrmacht. They'd been embarrassed to refuse, but they'd done it, all right. No wonder he despised the place.
"Only part?" Hanna Goldman said.
Sarah's father nodded to her mother. "Yes, only part. Some of the fellows there, they're not so bad. They have to do what their bosses tell them, or else they get it themselves. The army's not as nasty as the Party-nowhere near."
"Well, all right," Sarah said. "So what happened while you were filling in this crater?" Not long before, she would have been humiliated beyond words at her father's doing such menial work. So would he-he was an academic to the tips of his toes. He took hard labor for granted these days. As with gravedigging in Hamlet, familiarity lent it a quality of easiness.
"We'd just about got things fixed when we heard motors coming up the street towards us-and toward Wehrkreis headquarters," Samuel answered.
That was enough to make Sarah sit up and take notice. Horses and donkeys-and sweating men-hauled goods through Munster's streets these days. Gasoline and motor oil went straight to the front. Except for ambulances, doctors' cars, and fire engines, the city might have fallen back into the nineteenth century. All of Germany might have.