Two Fronts (28 page)

“I kind of like it at the front. I didn’t expect to, but damned if I don’t.” Adi raised an eyebrow. “They say the
Führer
did, too, don’t they?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard he—” The Panzer IV commander broke off. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why these guys were losing it right in front of him. They didn’t explain, either.

ONE MORE APPALLINGLY
official, eagle-and-swastika-bedizened letter in the mail. To make matters worse—at least as far as Sarah Bruck was concerned—the stamp stuck to this one bore Adolf Hitler’s petulant face. A double dose of Nazism, all to tell her …

She opened the envelope, taking a certain malicious pleasure in tearing the
Führer
’s face in half. That was the last pleasure she got. When she unfolded the letter, it was just what she thought it would be.

“
Scheisse!
” she said loudly.

“What is it, dear?” her mother asked from the kitchen.

“They
are
taking everything the Brucks had—‘in the interest of the welfare of the state,’ they say.” Sarah knew she sounded disgusted. She was. “It doesn’t mean anything but ‘because we can.’ ”

Hanna Goldman sighed. “Well, you’re right. I don’t know what we can do about it, though. Do you want to sue them?”

“Of course I do!” Sarah answered. Her mother let out a yip of alarm. Quickly, she went on, “But I know I can’t.” Making the Nazis notice her was the fastest way she could think of to end up in Dachau or Mauthausen or Theriesenstadt or some other place where she didn’t want to be.

Mother let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. “Oh, good! You do have some sense left after all,” she said. “For a second there, I wondered.”

“Yes, I do,” Sarah agreed, “and I wish to heaven I didn’t. I
want
to take them on. Of course, the mice wanted to bell the cat, too, and look how much good that did them.”

The mice in the fable would have stood a better chance against the cat than Germany’s Jews did against the government. If a mouse with a bell came up to a cat, the cat would have a snack, wash its face and paws, and curl up somewhere to go to sleep afterwards. But the Nazis wouldn’t content themselves with eliminating the one uppity Jew. They’d make every Jew in the
Reich
sorry. Chosen People? The Nazis would choose them, all right! Wouldn’t they just?

“What I’m really worried about is getting bread now that the bakery’s gone,” Mother said.

“You bake as well as the Brucks did.” Sarah meant it. She knew more about baking now than she’d ever dreamt she would. Her mother’s loaves were at least as good as any commercial product.

But Mother made an exasperated noise. “I don’t want to do it every couple of days. It’s a lot of work, and it takes a lot of fuel. Our coal ration isn’t very big, and it’s full of shale anyway. They have bakeries so most people don’t need to bake all the time. Only Jews in Münster
don’t
have a bakery any more.”

Sarah imagined some Nazi functionaries sitting in the
Rathaus
, hands comfortably cradling their bellies, laughing like brown-shirted hyenas at the Jews’ predicament. She hoped the next time the RAF came over, bombs would rain down on the bureaucrats’ houses. That would give them … some of what they deserved, anyhow.

As if reading her mind, Mother said, “Nights are getting longer now. We may see the bombers more often. Places in the east that haven’t got it for a while may see them, too.”

Father came back that evening with a joke making the rounds among the Aryans. As usual, he told it with a somber relish all his own: “When you see a friend after an air raid, if you say ‘Good morning,’ that means you’ve got some sleep. If you say ‘Good night,’ that means you haven’t. And if you say
‘Heil
Hitler!’—well, that means you’ve always been asleep.”

Sarah and her mother both giggled in delicious horror. “People say those things?” Sarah exclaimed. “Aren’t they afraid the blackshirts will haul them away and start hitting them with hoses?”

Samuel Goldman’s mouth twisted in amusement—wry amusement, but amusement nevertheless. “If the
Gestapo
grabbed everybody who told jokes like that, the
Reich
wouldn’t be able to make bobby pins any more, let alone rifles and planes and panzers. People aren’t happy. Everybody keeps wondering how long the war can go on.”

“We did that the last time around, too,” Mother said. “We thought it had to end pretty soon. But it just dragged on and on.”

“Tell me about it,” Father said. “In the trenches, we used to look forward to raiding the Tommies’ lines even if we were liable to get killed doing it. If we lived, we’d eat their bully beef and smoke their tobacco. They had so much more than we did, especially toward the end …” As if reminded, he rolled a cigarette from newspaper and dog-ends scrounged in the gutter. That was how Jews got their cigarettes these days; their ration had been cut off a long time ago. He smoked the nasty stuff with as much enjoyment as if it were a blend of the best Virginia and Turkish.

“I wonder if it’s that bad this time around,” Sarah said.

“Probably not quite,” Father answered judiciously. “We’re still living off what we’ve taken from places like Holland and Denmark. And most of what we’ve got goes to the soldiers. If they can’t fight, everything falls apart.” He grimaced. “Everything may fall apart no matter how well they fight.”

“No Americans this time around,” Hanna Goldman observed.

“That’s true.” Now Father spoke in musing tones. “I don’t think I ever came up against them—I was farther north. But people I know who did say they took a lot of needless casualties. They didn’t quite know what they were doing, not like our old sweats. They were brave, though. Everybody says that. And there were more and more of them, and we knew there’d be more still the longer we kept fighting. Ludendorff saw when to make terms, all right.”

“No ‘stab in the back’?” Sarah sounded more malicious than curious.

“No, of course not.” Her father waved the idea away. “We were whipped no matter what Hitler says. One
Landser
was worth more than one Tommy or one
poilu
or one doughboy, but so what? We weren’t worth two enemy soldiers apiece, or three, or five. If we’d kept going, they’d have steamrollered us in 1919—and don’t forget, the Austrians and the Turks had already given up and started falling apart. Stab in the back!” He snorted.

“Can we fight to a draw if the Americans stay out of Europe?” Mother asked.

Samuel Goldman rolled his eyes. “What am I? A prophet out of the Old Testament? I don’t know, but I don’t see Russia going out of the fight this time. The Tsar didn’t really believe his people would rise up against him if he gave them half a chance. Stalin’s like Hitler—he doesn’t trust anybody. Anyone who tries to overthrow him will have his work cut out. So the two-front war
will
go on. What comes of that …”

Sarah had a different question: “Will anything be left of us by the time the war finally ends, if it ever does?”

By
us
she meant
us Jews
. She would have explained that at need, but Father understood right away. He rolled his eyes again. “You really want me to play the prophet, don’t you? I think we’d all be dead if Poland were on Stalin’s side. Poland’s full of Jews. If they’re with the enemy, that would only make the Nazis go after us even harder than they already do.”

“Like stealing the Brucks’ estate.” Sarah didn’t bother hiding her bitterness.

“It could be worse,” Father said. “Most of the time, they have to think we did something before they throw us in a camp. They aren’t doing it just for the fun of it or throwing everybody in no matter what. Not yet they aren’t, anyway. And,
alevai
, they won’t start.”

“
Alevai omayn
,” Sarah echoed. The Yiddish reminded her what she was. Could things really get worse? She supposed they could—and maybe that was the scariest thought of all.

THEY’D STUCK ARISTIDE DEMANGE
up at the front again, the worthless
cons
with the fancy embroidery on their kepis. He would have been more disgusted were he less surprised. He was a damn nuisance. Worse, he was proud of being a damn nuisance. Of course his superiors wanted him dead. They lacked the balls to take care of it themselves. That being so, they had to hope the
Boches
would do the job for them.

The
Boches
hadn’t managed to tend to it in the last war, or in this one, either. The Reds also hadn’t done it this time through, when the rich guys decided they were even more trouble than the Nazis. So now Hitler’s boys got another crack at him.
Happy fucking day
, Demange thought.

“Lieutenant?” One of the
poilus
in his company broke into his gloomy reflections.

“Waddaya want, François?” Demange had no trouble learning his soldiers’ names. Sounding as if he gave a damn about them came harder, especially since he didn’t.

“Lieutenant, shouldn’t we attack the Nazis?” François must have found some raw meat somewhere.

“Go ahead.” Demange pointed northeast, toward the Franco-Belgian border. “They’ve spent the last year digging in, but don’t let that stop you. Be my guest, in fact. Then I won’t have to put up with your bullshit any more.”

François turned red. He was a new recruit. He hadn’t gone to Russia; he had no idea what combat was like. He’d find out pretty soon any which way. Then Demange—and he himself—would see what he was worth, and whether he was worth anything. In the meantime, he complained: “No, Lieutenant, I mean the whole army!”

“Oh, you can’t kill all of them by yourself?” Demange sounded amazed. “Listen to me, you … you bedbug, you. When we get orders, we move. Till we get orders, we sit tight. That will keep you alive for a while, probably longer than you deserve. Got me?”

“Got you,” François answered. Demange’s Gitane sent up angry smoke signals. Hastily, François changed his tune: “I understand, Lieutenant!”

“Good. Marvelous.
Wunderbar
.” Demange used the German word with an irony so savage, it almost turned unironic. And he was altogether serious when he jerked a thumb toward the tents where François’ comrades were huddling. “Now fuck off.”

François stayed out of his hair after that. Only an idiot would have gone on messing with a lieutenant who still behaved like the bad-tempered top sergeant he had been. While François—to Demange, at least—was definitely a moron, he wasn’t (quite) an idiot.

A couple of
poilus
in the company damn well were. Jean and Marcel were both Communists, which—to Demange, again—merely gave a name to the kind of idiot they were. Like François, they were hot to storm after the Nazis right away. Unlike François, they didn’t want to take no for an answer.

One of them was tall and skinny, one short and kind of plump. They looked like a bad comedy team, in other words. Demange didn’t bother remembering which was which. He did hope one of them would stick a finger in the other one’s eye. That was always good for a laugh.

“We must slay the Fascist hyenas!” the tall one gabbled. “The safety of the world proletariat depends on it.”

Demange’s Gitane twitched. “Oh, yeah?” he replied. “Says who?”

The Reds looked at each other. He’d seen before that Communists were as bad for that as fairies. After a pregnant pause, the short one said, “It is a well-known fact, Lieutenant.”

“Well known to who?” Demange didn’t bother with grammar.

“Why, to those who know such things, of course,” the soldier spluttered.

“Yeah, well, you can kiss my balls with your well-known facts, and so can they,” Demange snarled. “I’ll give you some well-known facts of my own. When the war started, you fucking Reds didn’t want to fight at all. Then when Hitler started jumping on Stalin’s corns, all of a sudden you couldn’t fight hard enough. And then, after France decided Hitler made a better bet than Stalin, all of a sudden you were yellow again, not Red. Now it’s rush the German trenches one more time!” He spat out the tiny butt and lit another cigarette. “You worthless pukes make me sick.”

“Come the revolution, you will be remembered,” the tall Communist said somberly.

“Good,” Demange growled, which made them both stare at him. He condescended to explain: “No one will ever remember you two dingle-berries for anything. I’ve shot Russians and Germans who were worth ten times both of you put together. God only knows why France doesn’t use punishment battalions. That’s where you belong.”

They licked their lips. They knew what those were, all right. If you screwed up in the Red Army—and, these days, in the
Wehrmacht
, too—they handed you a submachine gun and sent you where the fighting was hottest to redeem your honor. Odds against your living through it were long, but you got blown up knowing you were doing your precious country some good.

Assuming that made you happier while you were trying to shove your guts back into your belly where they belonged.

Demange had long been sure he had an easier time coping with the enemy than with people who loudly declared they were on the same side. The
cons
in the fancy kepis were a case in point. François, Jean, and Marcel were another. And the peasants of northeastern France made one more.

Well, actually they didn’t declare they were on Demange’s side. By the way they acted, he wouldn’t have bet on it, either. They were most of them big, fair fellows who looked more like Belgians—or Germans—than proper Frenchmen. He understood only about half of their clotted dialect: less than that when they larded it with Flemish words to make it harder. What he did understand, he commonly didn’t like.

For their part, they didn’t like the French Army. They’d been occupied by the
Boches
during the last war and the first part of this one. That gave them plenty of practice at hiding anything an occupier might want. These days, they figured their own country’s armed forces were doing the occupying.

To say they were reluctant to cough up supplies for the
poilus
beggared the power of language. You wouldn’t see a sack of grain or a chicken or even a turnip anywhere near their farmhouses. They would spread their hands and go “
Rien
.” Looking around, you’d be tempted to believe they had nothing.