Some of them tried to buy opium from him. They didn’t want to work harder; they wanted not to care about the work they had to do. Not without regret, Vasili told them he had none to sell. That wasn’t quite true, but he wouldn’t sell to strangers or even to a good many acquaintances. For opium, he had to trust his customers with his life. Mao had gone to war against the drug. Unlike earlier Chinese leaders who opposed it, he was serious to the point of killing people who grew it, people who sold it, and people who used it.
Vasili had enough money in his pocket so as not to need to take chances like that. He’d got a shack off to the west of the part of central Harbin the bomb had leveled. He picked one on that side of town on purpose. The winds here rarely blew from east to west. Whatever poisons remained in the seared ground, they wouldn’t come his way.
He wished he could move somewhere else, to a place where no atom bomb had fallen. But then he would have to start fresh, from nothing. And he would have to start someplace where no one had ever seen a white man before. In Harbin, at least, people were used to fair skin, blond hair, gray eyes, sharp noses, heavy beards. They mostly didn’t stare and point when he walked by. Some of them even spoke bits of Russian.
Every once in a while, he wondered if he could head north, slip over the border, and take up life in the Soviet Union. He might be able to pass himself off as somebody just out of the gulag. But everything his father had told him about the land argued against it.
Yes, there he would look like other people. He wouldn’t have papers like other people, though. Even released zeks-especially released zeks-had identity papers detailing who they were, where they could live, where they were allowed to travel.
Without those papers, you couldn’t get bread. You couldn’t get vodka. You couldn’t get cabbage. Unless you were a hermit in the woods who killed all his own food, you had to have papers.
Even if I looked like everyone else, I’d be a stranger there, he thought. Here in China, although people who’d never seen him before did double takes when he walked by, he knew how to fit in. He knew how things worked. The way the Chinese put it was, he had his bowl of rice. For now, that would have to do.
–
Any time they wouldn’t let you sleep at night, any time they put you to work or put you on the road instead, you were going to get the shitty end of the stick. Even a conscript like Tibor Nagy had no trouble figuring that out. He grumbled as he climbed up into the battered truck that would haul him and his countrymen out of Schweinfurt and into…into whatever disasters waited at the other side of the ride.
Isztvan Szolovits put it a little differently. As he scrambled into the truck, he muttered, “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
Sergeant Gergely heard that. Tibor didn’t think he was supposed to, but he did. He had ears like a rabbit’s. With a harsh laugh, he said, “You got it backwards, Jewboy. All the fires are behind us. The frying pan is where we’re going. What’s the worst they can do to us at the front?”
“Shoot us. Blow us up. Fry us with flamethrowers…Sergeant,” Szolovits answered. All that was much too true, but he might not have come out with it unless Gergely delivered that endearment.
The sergeant could have given him hell. Instead, Gergely just nodded. “That’s about the size of it, yeah,” he said. “When you put it next to one of those fucking atom bombs that still kill you even when they miss by two kilometers, it’s nothing.”
“Nice of the Russians to give us the chance to die for their country,” Tibor remarked.
“I don’t think they would if they had a choice,” Sergeant Gergely said. Once under canvas himself, the veteran lit a cigarette. The brief red glow of the match gave his sharp features a satanic cast. He went on, “But the way it looks to me is, they’re having trouble getting their own guys up to the front on account of everything that’s fallen between there and here. Lucky us, we’re already forward, and so they’ll use us.”
“They’ll use us up,” Szolovits emended. Gergely didn’t hear that-or if he did, he thought it was too obviously true to need comment.
With an out-of-tune roar, the truck got rolling. German roads were damn good. All the same, every jolt, every pothole, went straight from Tibor’s tailbone to his head. The workers at the factory must have given the truck springs once upon a time. They’d long since died of old age, though.
And the road, while good, had been bombed and shelled more than it had been repaired-and the men doing the repair work were Russian military engineers, not fastidious German roadbuilders. The only thing that mattered to the Red Army was keeping traffic going. Comfort was for capitalists and fairies and other socially undesirable elements.
No one had bothered fixing the truck’s muffler, either. The rear compartment stank of exhaust. The noise was also impressive-or depressing, depending on how you looked at it. Tibor was used to riding in such clunkers. They were what the Russians could spare for their satellite forces. The racket from this one, though, might keep the driver and him from hearing enemy fighter-bombers overhead till too late.
He couldn’t do anything about that but worry. Worry he did, even as he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t want to fight the Americans. He would rather have shot at the Russians who’d flung him into this war that wasn’t his. He had no doubt that he wasn’t the only conscript in the truck with such notions.
Sergeant Gergely wasn’t a conscript. But he’d been riding herd on reluctant soldiers since the Hungarian Army did its halfhearted best to help the Nazis try to keep the Red Army away from Budapest, away from Lake Balaton, away from the oilfields west of the lake…. He knew how they thought. He knew what kind of odds they were weighing.
Not at all out of the blue, he said, “Listen, you sorry sacks of shit, don’t be any dumber than you can help. If you bug out, people on our side will shoot you in the back. The Americans or limeys or Germans or whoever the hell we bump up against will shoot you in the front. And the Russians and our own security forces will make your families pay like you wouldn’t believe.”
He didn’t gloat about that, the way a movie villain might have. No-he sounded as matter-of-fact as a butcher telling a customer the price of a leg of mutton. If you do this, that will happen. As far as Tibor was concerned, he seemed scarier as he was.
The farther north and west they went, the worse the roads grew. They were passing through land that had been recently fought over, land the Red Army had taken away from the Americans. Dawn began to leak into the compartment through the opening in the rear. Through that opening, Tibor got glimpses of wrecked and shattered vehicles-everything from motorcycles all the way up to Stalin heavy tanks-shoved off to the shoulder so the ones that still ran could get through.
Not long before sunup, the truck convoy halted. The brakes on the machine that carried Tibor squealed like a kicked dog. “Out!” Sergeant Gergely yelled. “Out and under cover! The Americans spot us in the open in broad daylight, we deserve to get killed. They’ll sure think so, anyhow.”
Out Tibor went. They were at the edge of a large village or small town. Trenches and shell holes already marred the landscape. Tibor slid into a hole in the ground and started improving it with his entrenching tool. He hadn’t seen much fighting yet, but air attacks had already taught him that a well-made foxhole would save your life if anything would.
Sometimes nothing would. If one came down right where you happened to be, all your digging in just meant digging your own grave a little deeper. But you did what you could.
Artillery up ahead bellowed. The Russian guns didn’t sound very far up ahead. Tibor wondered whether American shells could reach this far. They had at some point, or the village wouldn’t be a jumble of wreckage with dead, swollen dogs-and, no doubt, dead, swollen people who hadn’t been planted yet-perfuming the air. But maybe the Russians had pushed them out of range.