Two Fronts (10 page)

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 Münster 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’être
: 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.

It wasn’t in the air. The weather stayed colder than any Frenchman who hadn’t been born in a deep freeze would have believed possible. Blizzards roared down from the North Pole one after another. Snow swirled through the air, thicker than tobacco smoke in an
estaminet
.

The French pissed and moaned about it. The stolid Russians clumped through it. Their
valenki
kept their feet from freezing. Their greatcoats, unlike Western European models, were made to withstand Arctic cold. They wore fur hats with flaps they could lower and tie to keep their ears from going solid and breaking off. And they figured large doses of vodka made the best antifreeze.

Not even their stolidity, though, could keep the sun from moving farther north in the sky every day. Daylight had been almost nonexistent when Demange got to Murmansk. He liked that fine. Darkness was the best time to get through the Barents Sea without being spotted by German submarines or bombers based in northern Norway.

But his regiment was somewhere down in the queue. The Russians were even more fanatical about queuing than the English were, and that said a mouthful. They were less efficient about it, though. And they didn’t have enough freighters in Murmansk to deal with the influx of French soldiers.

For the life of him, Demange couldn’t see why they didn’t. They were good proletarians, so maybe their diplomats didn’t wear pinstriped trousers the way French officials did. No matter what they wore, they must have spent a lot of time talking the French into climbing out of Hitler’s bed and coming back to Stalin’s. If they wanted French troops out of their country so badly, why in blazes didn’t they have ships waiting to take them away?

Because they were Russians. That was the only answer Demange could see. They spewed propaganda about the dictatorship of the proletariat and about the glories of centralized planning. When the Germans made noises about planning, they meant them. The Ivans? They were like a chorus of whores singing the praises of virginity.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t stood a decent chance of getting Demange killed. Once the equinox passed, days in these latitudes stretched like a politician’s conscience. Murmansk went from having no daylight to speak of to having too bloody much in what seemed like nothing flat.

Demange shepherded his company aboard a rusty scow through more snow flurries. But it was going on nine o’clock at night when he did it, and he had no trouble seeing the falling snow. “Come on, my dears,” he growled. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

“Don’t you want to get home, Lieutenant?” one of his men asked as they stumped up the gangplank.

Demange still couldn’t get used to being called
Lieutenant
. He’d spent too many happy years as a sergeant despising junior officers. Now he’d turned into what he’d scorned for so long.

To make matters worse, he’d run out of Gitanes. He was reduced to smoking Russian
papirosi:
a little bit of tobacco at the end of a long paper holder. Russian tobacco tasted funny, and the holder felt wrong in his mouth. All that left him even more short-tempered than usual. “Jules, I want to get home
alive
,” he answered. “And we’d’ve had a hell of a lot better chance sailing out of here three weeks ago.”

Jules opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. That was the smartest thing he could have done.

The freighter wallowed away from the pier. It took its place in a convoy. Royal Navy destroyers and corvettes served as escort vessels. Seeing them cheered Demange up—a little. On the water, the English had some idea of what they were doing. He certainly preferred them as escorts to ships from the Red Fleet. At least he could be pretty sure their skippers weren’t blind drunk.

Out into the Barents the convoy went. It zigzagged till night finally fell. As soon as darkness descended, all the ships hightailed it west at the best speed of the slowest freighter. Demange would have been content to leave that sorry
con
behind to shift for itself … unless, of course, it happened to be the miserable tub that was carrying him.

In these latitudes and at this season, daybreak came all too soon. The ships stopped hightailing and started sedately zigzagging once more. Demange peered out at the gray-green water. He’d yell if he saw a periscope—which would probably help just enough to let him go down yelling.

He saw nothing but ocean and a few scudding seabirds. No Flying Pencils or broad-winged Heinkels droned overhead to bomb the convoy. No Stukas roared down on the ships with sirens screaming like the end of the world.

A few days later, he did see something he’d never seen before: a coastline that a sailor told him belonged to Scotland. He’d fought alongside Tommies in two wars, but that was his first glimpse of the British Isles. It made him think he likely would make it back to France. And the Germans, having missed this fine chance to kill him, would get more shots at it.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel lay beside Sofia in the narrow bed in her cramped little flat in Bialystok. “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come back,” he said sorrowfully, running his hand along the velvety skin of her flank. “Rumor is, they’re going to send us to the West again.”

If his half-Jewish mistress was spying for the Russians, he’d just handed her enough to get himself shot at sunrise. “That’s a shame,” she said, with an exquisite shrug. “I’ll miss you—some.” Like a scorpion, she always had a sting in her tail.

“I’ll miss you a lot,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I love you, you know.”

“You think you do,” Sofia answered. “But that’s only because I let you get lucky. You’ll get over it as soon as you find somebody else.”