"Cognitive dissonance!" he said happily.
"Huh?" Mike said. He could talk about the dialectic till everything turned blue, but if something wasn't in the Marxist-Leninist lexicon, he didn't know and didn't want to know. Chaim thought that made him narrow, but more Communists were made in his image than in Chaim's.
"Never mind," Weinberg said. Then, alert as a prairie dog at a rattlesnake convention, he sat up and pointed north. "What's that?" he asked, his voice rising in alarm.
"Airplanes!" Mike said. "Lots of airplanes!" Cigarettes and ammo might not trump the almighty dialectic, but airplanes did. Carroll wasted no more time discussing them. He dove into the bombproof Chaim had been teasing him about only a few minutes earlier.
Chaim had a bombproof, too, shored up with whatever bits of timber he could liberate. He didn't jump into it right away. He had a prairie dog's curiosity. It made him stare up at the swarm of Ju-52/3s and He-111s rumbling across the sky, all of them, it seemed, straight toward him. The Junkers trimotors were obsolete as bombers, except in Spain. The Heinkels still did their deadly work everywhere from England to the Soviet border.
Where were the Republican fighters that would have given this air armada a hard time? Wherever they were, they weren't here, and here was where they needed to be. When bombs started tumbling out of the enemy planes, Chaim dove for his burrow like any prairie dog that wanted to live to raise a new litter.
Air attack was even worse than artillery bombardment. Chaim thought so when he was being bombed, anyhow. When he was being shelled, his opinion changed. It changed again when machine guns tried chewing him to bits. Whatever was happening to you right now was the worst thing in the world… till something else happened.
This was plenty bad enough. Dirt trickled down between his bits of planking. It wasn't just that it got on the back of his neck as he huddled there. If one of those bombs set all the dirt above him crashing down, he would die without any direct enemy wound. How good had his carpentry been? One way or the other, he'd find out. No, he didn't want it to be or the other.
More and more bombs whistled down. Bombs were easy to make: impact fuses, explosives, and sheet metal. Even Spaniards had a tough time screwing up the combination. The Nationalists had it down solid. "Enough already, goddammit!" Chaim screamed. No one paid any attention to him.
Eventually, bombs started falling farther away. The drone from the bombers' engines faded, then disappeared. It was over-till the next time. Chaim crawled out. He nodded to Mike Carroll, who was emerging from his bombproof at the same time. Then he peered over the battered parapet, to make sure Sanjurjo's men weren't rushing forward to take advantage of the bombing run.
They weren't. German troops probably would have been. However brave Spaniards were-and both sides were, above and beyond the call of duty-they weren't what anyone would call efficient. The landscape had been drastically rearranged. Except for a few saplings leaning at odd angles, it might have come straight from the cratered moon.
Seeing he wouldn't need his rifle right away, Chaim set it down. He pulled another Gitane from the pack. He missed his mouth the first time he put it in, and he needed three or four tries before he could light a match.
Mike watched with knowing eyes. "I've been there," he said. "Give me another one, will you?"
"Sure," Chaim said. If the other International had teased him, he probably wouldn't have. But Mike had indeed been through the mill with him. They smoked together. Little by little, Chaim stopped shaking. Cigarettes helped as much as anything, except maybe brandy. Trouble was, nothing helped much. "WATCH YOURSELF, PETE," Herman Szulc warned. "Here come the Japs."
"I see 'em," Pete McGill answered. They'd patched things up, after a fashion. And on Shanghai's mad, crowded streets, missing Japanese soldiers was harder than seeing them. The Japs were the only people who behaved as if all the Chinese frantically hawking this, that, and the other thing-and the Europeans who livened up the throngs-weren't there at all. They marched straight ahead. If you didn't clear out, they'd knock you down with rifle butts (or just shoot you, if they happened to be in a lousy mood) and then walk over you. You couldn't do anything about it. Shanghai was theirs.
Pete got out of the way, along with his Marine buddies. They stood out in the crowd, not just because they were white but because they stood a head taller than most of the Chinese around them. Pete met the eyes of a noncom. He nodded first, with respect but without fear. Respect would do. The Jap nodded back, as if to say, Maybe some other time, but not now. Then he shouted at his men. They were already stiff as robots. They got stiffer yet.
"Goddamn monkeys think they're as good as white people," Szulc muttered.
"Watch it, Herman," Sergeant Larry Koenig snapped. "Too many folks here savvy some English."
"Yeah, yeah," Szulc said. They weren't on duty; he didn't have to kowtow to Koenig because the sergeant had those three stripes on his sleeve.
"You better watch it, Herman." Pete still enjoyed sticking the needle in. "Way you go on, you figure Polacks are as good as white people."
"Ah, your mother," Szulc said. If he'd been drunk they might well have started banging away at each other right there. But it was still morning. Nobody'd got potted… yet.
Another company of Japanese soldiers marched by. They did think they were as good as white men. Their faces were hard and impassive, but every line of their bodies shouted their pride. We beat the crap out of the Russians once, and now we're doing it again, they might have yelled. And if you Yankees want to fuck around with us, step right up. We'll knock your ass over teakettle, too.
They couldn't have been more different from the Chinese who scrambled away from them. The Chinese knew they were licked. Everybody knocked them around. They couldn't do a damn thing about it, any more than a wife stuck in a rotten marriage could when her husband beat her up for the hell of it. She might hate. Hell, she had to hate all the more when she had no hope. Hate or not, though, she was stuck. She had to take it. So did the Chinese.
"Good thing the Japs don't know you got yourself that White Russian girlfriend," Herman Szulc said with a leer. "They'd probably figure she was radioing everything you tell her straight to old Joe Stalin."
"Jesus Christ, Herman, shut the fuck up!" Pete said. "You open your big dumb mouth any wider, you'll fall right in."
"Who you callin' dumb?" Szulc growled. Some dumb guys didn't have a hint that they weren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Others were uneasily aware that their candlepower left something to be desired. You really pissed them off when you called them stupid, because down deep they feared you knew what you were talking about. Szulc was one of those. He folded his hands into rocklike fists.
"Knock if off, Herman," Sergeant Koenig told him. "You got him, so he got you back."
"He called me a Polack first," Szulc said. Sometimes the Marine Corps looked a lot like third-grade recess.
Koenig only laughed. "Yeah? So? What are you, a sheeny like Weinstein?"
"Not me!" Szulc crossed himself. "He ain't just a yid, neither. He's a fuckin' Red. If anybody's sending shit to Stalin, he's the guy."
It was a good thing Max wasn't there, or he would have tried to clean Szulc's clock for him. It wasn't that he wasn't a Red. But he didn't let anybody rag on him for being a Jew. There weren't many Jewish leathernecks. The handful Pete had known were uncommonly tough, even for the Corps.