When Marian got her ration pack and a real sandwich for Linda (“Dog meat” was her daughter’s take on the bologna), someone waved to her from one of the crowded tables in the mess hall. She peered that way, smiled, and waved back. “Mr. Tabakman!” she said. “It’s good to see you!” It would have been good to see anyone she knew, but she didn’t say that.
“You can eat with my friends and me if you want,” the cobbler said. “We’ll make room for you and Linda.”
More than anything else, his remembering her daughter’s name decided her. “Come on, dear,” she said, shepherding Linda forward.
Fayvl Tabakman’s friends were a couple of other middle-aged Jews. He introduced them as Yitzkhak and Moishe. They both spoke English with accents thicker than his. Plainly, they would have been more at home in Yiddish, or perhaps Polish or Russian. But, like him, they stuck to America’s language while talking to lifelong Americans. Any other speech was for when they were amongst themselves.
They were no dopes, even if they did have heavy accents. They talked about how the war in western Germany was going and about how Stalin thought as if they belonged on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I saw Stalin once, in Minsk,” Moishe said. “I was lucky-Stalin didn’t see me.”
Accent or not, he made Linda laugh. “That’s funny!” she said, and was amused enough (or hungry enough) to take two more bites from her sorry sandwich.
He looked at her over the tops of his bifocals. “Funny now, sure. I can sit here and tell the story. Not so funny then. Stalin is a very scary man. Even in a crowd of people, I was nervous.” Marian got the idea that to him the atomic bomb was only the latest catastrophe he’d lived through, and that he didn’t expect it to be the last-or the worst.
Marian got down her own canned-beef ration. Two of the Jews were eating Spam instead. Since they didn’t say anything, she didn’t, either. Moishe gave her the hard candies from his pack for Linda. She passed back the cigarettes from hers. She didn’t smoke enough to miss them much, and his yellow-stained index and middle fingers said he did.
Fayvl walked her and Linda back to the Studebaker. “Thank you,” she said. She’d never had trouble, but she knew she might.
He touched the brim of his old-fashioned cloth cap. “It’s a nothing,” he said. “Once upon a time-” Breaking off, he turned and walked away fast. Marian wondered just what he was remembering. Whatever it was, she could tell how much it hurt.
–
In all his flying time, Boris Gribkov had never been airsick. Less than a day aboard the Stalin had him puking up the sausage and sauerkraut he’d eaten an hour before. The destroyer’s skipper, a commander named Anatoly Edzhubov, was sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Boris Pavlovich,” he said. “The North Pacific in the wintertime can be a nasty roller coaster. Here, drink this to get the taste out of your mouth.” He held out a tumbler of clear liquid.
Gribkov drank, expecting it to be water. It was vodka: fine, smooth vodka, but strong as a plow horse. He got it down without choking. Had Edzhubov wanted to make him splutter, or did the skipper really think he was helping? “Thank you, Anatoly Ivanovich,” Boris said when he could speak again. “That hits the spot-with a grenade.”
“There you go! Good for what ails you, see?” Edzhubov beamed. He had a round, ruddy, peasanty face with several gold teeth he showed in a perpetual smile. He didn’t seem the sort who would have tried to make Boris feel worse on purpose, but you never could tell.
The destroyer and the rest of the little rescue flotilla were steaming west now, into the teeth of the swells. Boris dosed his seasickness with more vodka. It helped him sleep, if nothing else. The bunk in the officers’ quarters included a belt to keep him from suddenly waking up on the steel deck. He wasn’t too drunk to use it.
They changed course two mornings after rescuing the Tu-4’s crew. “I’m sorry, Comrade, but we’ll be at sea a little longer than I expected,” Edzhubov said.
“What’s gone wrong?” Boris asked. The skipper still seemed cheerful, but his eyes had a faraway look.
“Well, we were bound for Petropavlovsk,” Edzhubov answered. “There’s…not much point to that any more, I’m afraid.”
“Not much point?” Boris realized what that had to mean as soon as the question was out of his mouth. “Oh! The Americans?”
“Yes, the Americans,” the naval officer agreed. “They gave the place a dose of the same medicine your crew served to Seattle. They got Petropavlovsk and Magadan and Vladivostok. They hit Provideniya, too.”
Provideniya wasn’t a port, except for a few months at the height of summer. In this season, the ice ran kilometers out from the land. But the Yankees wouldn’t be hitting it because it was a naval base. Colonel Doyarenko had been a good man. He was still a good man if he remained alive, but Gribkov feared he didn’t.
Trying not to think about Colonel Doyarenko and what might have happened to him, the bomber pilot asked, “Where will we go, then?”
“I have orders to put in at Korf-or rather, to get as close to Korf as we can,” Edzhubov replied. “It isn’t a big city, which is probably why the Americans didn’t bother to bomb it.”
“I’m sorry, Anatoly Ivanovich. Please forgive a dumb landlubber, but I have no idea where Korf is.” Tu-4s didn’t fly into or out of the place-Boris knew that much.
“It’s on the east side of the neck of the Kamchatka Peninsula,” the skipper answered. “You get there by sea, by sled in the wintertime, and these days by air, too. They catch salmon in the river, and there are mines for platinum and brown coal close by.”
“All right.” A town out here would have natives living in it, natives and zeks who’d served their sentences but were held near the gulags by the terms of their internal exile. Gribkov grinned a sly grin. “I bet they brew a lot of samogon, too.”
“Well, what else is there to do in a place like that?” Edzhubov said. “Not as if a lot of real vodka gets there.”
Boris nodded. Russian moonshine flourished wherever there were Russians but not enough official booze. Some of it was as good as anything the state distilleries turned out. Some was poison, literally. It was cheaper than the official product, because you didn’t have to pay the tax that went into the government’s pocket. That was the other thing that made it so widespread.
They sailed through a storm. If Gribkov had thought the North Pacific was bad before, now he admitted he hadn’t known the first thing about it. Any dog as sick as he was, they would have shot. His fellow airmen suffered with him. Misery sympathized with company even if it didn’t love it.
Most of the sailors took it all in stride. A couple of them also puked their guts out, but only a couple. You could get used to anything. You could, or you could die trying. Boris rather felt like it.
Little by little, more news trickled in to the Stalin. Radio Moscow went off the air suddenly and without warning. When it came back, several hours later, it had a weaker signal and unfamiliar broadcasters. That alone would have made Gribkov guess something horrible had happened to the station and to the city that housed it.
He supposed it made sense that the Americans would strike the heart of the rodina as well as the Soviet Far East. Except for Vladivostok, the Russian cities in this part of the world were small towns compared to the ones along the Pacific Coast of the United States. And supplies for the war in Europe traveled from and traveled through the cities in the USSR’s heartland.
But how much of the world would be left in one piece if they kept blowing up city after city? That was a question Boris couldn’t begin to answer. It was also a question he couldn’t ask anyone else. If he did, the MGB would soon be asking questions of him.
Stalin came on the radio not long before the destroyer that bore his name reached Korf. “The reactionary imperialists have murdered good Soviet citizens by the million,” he said, his Georgian accent flavoring the way he spoke as it always did. “They have done their best to murder me, but their best is not good enough. The struggle for socialism, for Communism, will continue to its final, inevitable triumph against the Americans as it did against the Hitlerites. Forward, progressives of the world, to victory!”