You could. Truman suspected Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man of more than a few whims and whimsies, would have. As for himself, he refrained. His hard Midwestern frugality was as much a part of him as his bifocals-more, because he’d had it longer. So was the relentless drive to get on with the job.
He muttered again, this time with the kind of language he’d used while his battery was throwing shells at the Huns during the First World War. Scientists here told him the new bombs, the end-of-the-world bombs, were coming soon.
Joe Stalin, damn his black, stubborn heart, had scientists working for him, too. Good ones. He wouldn’t have been so dangerous if they were a pack of thumb-fingered clods. Hitler hadn’t expected the Russians to make such good tanks, or so many of them. Truman hadn’t expected Stalin to pull the Bull bomber or the MiG-15 out of his hat.
And nobody had expected the Russians to make their own atom bombs so fast. General Groves, who’d ramrodded the Manhattan Project through to its triumphant completion, hadn’t figured Stalin would learn to build an A-bomb for twenty-five years, if he ever did. Which proved…what? That Groves made a better engineer and manager of engineers than a prophet.
No doubt those Soviet big brains were working just as hard for their boss as their American counterparts were here. They might be working even harder. Stalin, like Hitler, made unfortunate things happen to people who didn’t satisfy him.
Truman muttered one more time. Even assuming the United States won this war-even assuming a war like this was winnable-what was he supposed to do about Russia, or with it? It was too big to conquer and occupy in any ordinary sense of the words. Napoleon had discovered that; despite far greater resources at his disposal, so had the Führer.
You couldn’t just leave it alone, either. When you did, the Russians got frisky. That was bad enough before, when all they exported was world revolution. Atomic bombs gave the question new urgency-but, dammit, no new answers.
13
Ihor Shevchenko was not a religious man-not an outwardly religious man, anyhow. He’d lived his whole life through the Soviet Union’s aggressive campaigns against supernatural belief of every kind. Only a man with the urge to become a martyr or one with an insatiable curiosity about what a gulag looked like from the inside could be outwardly religious in this day and age. Assuming there was any difference between those two types.
Things had loosened up a little during the war against the Nazis. With the country’s fate in the balance, Stalin had decided he’d be a Russian patriot first and a good Communist only later. If believing helped people kill Germans, he was all for it.
If you looked at things the right way, that was funny. Stalin was no more Russian than Hitler was. The thick accent with which he spoke Russian showed he was a Georgian, a blackass from the Caucasus. Again, though, if you were smart enough to see the joke there, you needed to be smart enough to know better than to tell it to anybody else.
After victory, the powers that be seemed willing to let babushkas and a few old men keep going to services without getting into trouble. Even a younger woman might get away with it, though it would be noted and wouldn’t look good on her record. A man of Ihor’s age who stuck his nose inside a church would still catch it. Since going with the current was always easier and safer than swimming against it, that was what he did.
All of which meant he had no real idea how to pray, only bits he remembered from when he was a little boy. For the first time in his life, he found himself regretting that. He wanted to prostrate himself before the icon of some mournful-eyed, white-bearded saint and give the holy man reverence for not letting Anya go to Kiev and get caught in the Americans’ atomic fire. He wanted to light candles in front of the icon to show his gratitude.
When he told his wife as much, she said, “Don’t be an idiot.” It wasn’t so much that she was a New Soviet Woman, someone for whom religion was a relic of the primitive past. She was, however, a practical woman. Proving as much, she continued, “Do you want to bring the Chekists down on your head?”
They both spoke in whispers, in the darkness of their cramped room in the middle of the night. Such talk was safe then if it ever was. Sometimes, of course, it never was. Ihor answered, “A lot of them went up in smoke along with the rest of Kiev.”
“A lot of them, sure, but not all of them. You can bet on that-not all of them,” Anya said. “Can you imagine us without people watching to keep other people in line?”
Ihor shook his head. He and his wife both usually called the Soviet secret police by the name the Tsars’ secret police had used. That said everything that needed saying about the permanence of secret policemen in this part of the world. Even if the Soviet Union stopped being the Soviet Union and for some reason went back to being Russia, whoever was in charge would use them to keep an eye on things. Unless, of course, he happened to be a secret policeman himself.
Anya responded to the motion, saying, “Well, there you are.”
“Tak. Here I am.” Only after the word was out of his mouth did he realize he’d said yes in Ukrainian. The language he’d learned from his mother and father was for moments like this-and for when he wanted to seem like a clodhopper to someone in authority trying to give him a hard time. Otherwise, he used Russian. He went on, “Here you are, too. I’m glad of it.” He squeezed her.
She squeaked in surprise. “So am I,” she said when she got her breath back. “If I hadn’t come down with the sniffles-”
“If God hadn’t sent you the sniffles,” Ihor broke in.
But his wife only laughed. “Have you got any idea how silly that sounds?” she said.
He listened to himself. “It does, doesn’t it?” he said, self-conscious and embarrassed at the same time. You thought about God-if you thought about God-as throwing thunderbolts around, not giving somebody a head cold.
He kissed her. This time, her arms tightened around him. Things went on from there. When you weren’t doing it for the first time, messing around wasn’t embarrassing. You didn’t run the risk of saying something foolish, the way he had a moment before. In fact, you didn’t have to say anything at all. Ihor liked that fine.
The other thing making love let Ihor do was show Anya how glad he was that she hadn’t gone to Kiev. He’d told her, of course, told her over and over, but this seemed so much better. Words weren’t enough for some things. He’d heard once from somebody-maybe during the war; he couldn’t remember now-that writers said the trick was showing readers things, not telling them about things. Ihor barely had his letters, but that made sense to him.
Losing Kiev meant more to the collective farm than fewer visits from the MGB. It also meant gasoline didn’t come out to the kolkhoz for the spring plowing. At some collectives, progressive and advanced, that would have been a disaster. Here, it was an annoyance that cost people extra work, but no more. Horse-drawn plows sat slowly rusting in a barn. After the Red Army reconquered the area from the Hitlerites, plowing with horses again rather than people had seemed the height of modernity.
One night near the end of March, just before plunging headlong into exhausted slumber, Ihor did think to ask Anya, “What will we do with our grain once we harvest it? We sent it in to Kiev, but Kiev doesn’t need so much any more.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Anya agreed. Nobody knew how many people had died in the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, not to the nearest ten thousand-maybe not to the nearest hundred thousand. Or if anyone did know, he wasn’t saying.