Samuel Goldman could also have said that. Could? Her father had, many times. Sarah didn't find it surprising: she'd said the same kind of thing herself, too. She almost told Isidor about her brother. But no. What he didn't know, he couldn't blurt out. Saul's life rode on secrecy.
And Saul's fate rode on the tracks of a panzer. He was bound to have Aryan crewmates. He was also bound to be fighting as hard as he could to help the Nazis win their war. How perverse was that? As perverse as anything Sarah had ever imagined.
Perverse enough to let Isidor notice the look on her face. "What is it?" he said. "Are you all right?"
"It's everything," Sarah answered at once. "I'm a Jew in Munster. How can I be all right?"
"Well, it all depends on the company," Isidor said, and then he turned a flaming red, as if he were standing in front of one of his father's back ovens with the door wide open and the heat blasting into his face.
He was sweeter on Sarah than she was on him. He was earnest and nice-no two ways about that. It wasn't even that she felt no spark when he took her hand. But she thought she ought to feel a bigger one if something serious was going to happen.
Or maybe she was crazy. What kind of prospects did a Jewish girl in Munster-or anywhere in the Reich-have these days? If somebody not too bad liked you, shouldn't you grab as hard as you could?
Before he went into the Wehrmacht, a young professor who'd studied under her father and done what little he could for him had been interested in her. But he hadn't been interested enough to risk courting her. She couldn't even blame him. If she were an Aryan, she wouldn't risk courting a Jew, either. Life gave you plenty of tsuris at the best of times; you didn't need to look for more.
She and Isidor walked on. A lion slept in the corner of his cage. His head was twisted to one side, as if he were an enormous tabby cat. He seemed to sleep most of the time. At least, Sarah hadn't seen him awake in several visits to the zoo lately. Well, what else did he have to do, shut away behind bars?
As if picking that thought from her mind, Isidor said, "I know just how the lion feels."
"Me, too," she exclaimed, liking him better for that.
A giraffe stripped leaves from branches set on a bracket high up in its tall enclosure. Its jaws worked from side to side as it chewed. A camel stared at the humans with ugly disdain, then spat in their direction. "See?" Isidor said. "Even the camel knows we're Jews."
"Nah." Sarah shook her head. "It would have got us for sure if it did." They both laughed. Sometimes you couldn't help it.
People walked by carrying steins. A fat man (his saggy skin suggested he once might have been fatter yet) with a big white mustache sold beer from a handcart he pushed along in front of him. "Want one?" Isidor asked.
"I've love one," Sarah said. "But-" She didn't go on… or need to.
"He doesn't have 'I don't serve Jews!' plastered all over everything like a lot of the pigdogs," Isidor said. "Let's try it. What's the worst he can do? Tell us no, right?" He hurried over to the beer-seller. Sarah followed briskly. As if Isidor weren't wearing a yellow star, he told the man, "Two, please."
"Sorry, kid," the fellow said. "I'd like to. Honest to God, I would. My mother's father, he was one of your people. Sometimes the clowns at city hall, they give me a hard time about it-but only sometimes, on account of I just got the one grandfather. But if they was to think I wanted to be one myself…" He turned a thumb toward the ground, as if he were shouting for blood in a Roman amphitheater. (So Sarah thought about it, but her father taught, or had taught, ancient history. Isidor might have seen things differently, but he also couldn't miss the beer-seller's meaning.)
The baker's son sighed. "They'll come for you anyway, you know. They may come later, but they'll come."
"Oh, sure." The old man whuffled air out through his mustache. "But when you've got as many kilometers on you as I do, I figure it's about even money I crap out on my own before the bastards get around to it." He dipped his head to Sarah. "Sorry for the way I talk, miss."
"It's all right." She set her hand on Isidor's arm. It might have been-she thought it was-the first time she'd reached out to touch him, even innocently like that, instead of the other way around. "See? I said he wouldn't."
"Yeah, you did." Isidor touched the brim of his ratty cap in a mournful salute to the beer-seller. "Good luck."
"You, too." With a grunt, the fellow lifted the handcart's handles. The iron tires rattled on the slates as he shoved it down the path between the cages.
"Did you notice something?" Sarah said after he got out of earshot.
"I noticed he was a jerk," Isidor said, probably in lieu of something stronger. "What else was there to notice?"
"He wouldn't say 'Jew,'" Sarah answered. "His grandfather was 'one of you people.' He had 'just the one grandfather.' He didn't want to be 'one.' He knew what he didn't want to be, but he wouldn't say it."
"Ever since Hitler took over, I bet he's been going, 'Oh, no, not me. I ain't one of them,'" Isidor said. "By now, he may even believe it. Whether he does or not, he sure wants to." He scowled after the man. "And he's right, dammit. He may not last till they decide to land on him with both feet. We aren't so lucky."
"They've only landed on us with one foot so far," Sarah said. And maybe that was the worst thing of alclass="underline" she knew, or imagined she knew, how much worse things could get. WIND WHISTLED through the pines. It came out of the northwest, and it carried the chill of the ice with it. When winds brought blizzards to Japan in the winter, people said they came straight from Siberia. It wasn't winter yet-it was barely fall-but you could already feel how much worse things were going to get here. Sergeant Hideki Fujita was in Siberia. As he had in Mongolia farther west, he discovered that the winds just used this place to take a running start before they roared over the ocean and slammed into the Home Islands. They were already frigid by the time they got here.
"When will the snow start?" he asked another noncom, a fellow who'd served in northeastern Manchukuo for a long time.
"Tomorrow… The day after… Next week… Maybe next month, but that's pushing things," the other sergeant said. "Don't worry about it. When the snow does start, you'll know, all right."
"Hai, hai, hai," Fujita said impatiently. He looked north. "Miserable Russians'll cause even more trouble than they did when the weather was good-or as good as it gets around here, I mean."
"They're animals," the other sergeant replied with conviction. "Where they come from, they live with winters like this all the time. It's no wonder they're so hairy. Their beards help keep their faces from freezing off."
"I believe it," Fujita said. "I wanted to let my own whiskers grow when we were in Mongolia to try and keep my chin warm, but the company CO wouldn't let us do it. He said we had to stay neat and clean and represent the real Japan."
"Officers are like that," the other fellow agreed. "Shigata ga nai, neh? We grew beards along the Ussuri, I'll tell you. We tried, anyhow. Most of us couldn't raise good ones. It just looked like fungus on our faces. But this one guy-he had a pelt! We called him the Ainu because he was so hairy."
"Did he come from Hokkaido?" Fujita asked with interest. The natives the Japanese had largely supplanted lived on the northern island, though they'd once inhabited northern Honshu as well.