2
Konstantin Morozov slid a ruble across the bar. “Another,” he said in Russian.
“Da,” the bartender said, and gave him a fresh mug of beer. The man in the apron was a German, but he understood enough Russian to get by. Damn near every Fritz in Meiningen did. With a couple of Soviet tank armies stationed near the border with the American zone, bartenders and shopkeepers and waiters and whores needed to know the occupiers’ language if they were going to get money out of them.
For that matter, Morozov could have asked for his refill in German. He’d never be fluent, but he could manage. Unless he had to, though, he preferred not to. He’d been a tankman since 1944. He’d joined the Red Army just before Operation Bagration, the great attack that drove the Nazis out of the Soviet Union. He’d seen what they’d done to the rodina, the motherland. And he’d paid them back, with as much interest as he could add, in the grinding drive west that ended in Berlin the following spring. German still felt dirty in his mouth.
He’d been a private starting out, of course, a seventeen-year-old kid slamming shells into the breech of a T-34/85’s cannon. New fish always started as loaders; the job didn’t take much in the way of brains. If you showed you had something on the ball-and if you lived, naturally-you could go on to bigger and better things.
He’d had four (or was it five?) tanks killed out from under him. A puckered scar on his left calf showed where a German machine-gun bullet bit him when he was bailing out from one of them. Burn scars mostly hidden by the right sleeve of his khaki tunic reminded him he hadn’t got out of another soon enough. That had hurt like a mad bastard-and burning human flesh smelled too much like a pork roast forgotten in a hot oven.
But he was still here. That put him ahead of the game right there. So many of the men who’d fought alongside him were dead, some in graves, some not. And the Nazis had murdered civilians for fun, or so it seemed. He’d heard officers arguing about whether the Great Patriotic War cost the USSR twenty or thirty million deaths. Both numbers were too enormous to mean much to him. Twenty or thirty deaths? A tragedy. Multiply by a million? A statistic, nothing more.
He eyed the bartender. The fellow was about thirty-five. He had a scar of his own, on his forehead. Chances were he hadn’t picked it up playing tiddlywinks. “What did you do during the war?” Morozov asked him in Russian.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” the Fritz answered. And maybe that was true, and maybe it was horseshit. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit to whatever it was.
Well, too damn bad if he didn’t. Konstantin asked the same question in German. If he didn’t like the answer he got, he’d knock the bastard into the middle of next week. It was possible for a Red Army senior sergeant to get in trouble for roughing up a German. It was possible, yeah, but it sure wasn’t easy.
But the bartender said, “Oh! During the war!”-so maybe that was what he hadn’t got. “I fought in the Low Countries and France. Then I went to North Africa. I got this there.” Konstantin thought he was going to touch that scar, but he did more. He popped his right eye out of its socket. It lay in the palm of his hand-it was glass.
“It’s a good match for the one you kept.” Morozov meant that. He hadn’t noticed it was artificial. It had to be German work. Russian glass eyes looked like, well, glass eyes. The tankman gestured. “Put it back. You aren’t so pretty without it.”
“Sie haben Recht,” the German agreed gravely. Back went the eye. He blinked a couple of times to settle it in place. Now that Konstantin knew, he could tell the eye was false. But he never would have thought so had the Fritz not shown him.
He downed the beer. He’d drunk enough to feel it, not enough to get tipsy. After the daily combat ration of a hundred grams of vodka, beer seemed like water going down the hatch. It did taste nice, though; he had to give it that. Good vodka didn’t taste like anything much. Bad vodka reminded him of an accident with a chemistry set.
Drinking beer, you had to work to get smashed. It was easy with vodka. The whole point to drinking vodka was getting smashed. Maybe the point to drinking beer was drinking without getting smashed. If so, it was a point too subtle for Konstantin to fathom.
He drained the mug, tipped the barkeep, and went back to the toilets. They were cleaner than they would have been in a Russian dive, but not a lot cleaner. The ammonia reek of stale piss stung his nose.
After leaving the tavern, he walked back to the tent city outside of town. It was cold. Some snow lay on the ground. He’d known plenty worse, though. The Red Army didn’t worry about the weather. Whatever it happened to be, you did what your commanders told you.
Now, instead of loading in a T-34, he commanded a T-54. He wished the Red Army’d had these during the last war. They would have made the Hitlerites roll over onto their backs and show their bellies in jig time. Thick armor, that elegant turtle-shell dome of a turret, a 100mm gun that would have smashed up every Tiger or Panther ever made…
Someone waved to him. He came to attention-it was Captain Oleg Gurevich, the company commander. “What do you need, Comrade Captain?” he asked.
“Is your tank ready for action, Sergeant?” Gurevich demanded.
“I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Morozov said, which was never the wrong answer. “The tank is ready to roll as soon as we climb aboard.” That wasn’t quite true, but it came close enough. They wouldn’t move forward right this minute. Konstantin didn’t think they would, anyhow. “But what’s gone wrong now?”
“It’s the stinking Americans,” Gurevich said. He was even younger than Konstantin. He’d come into the Red Army after the war ended. He didn’t remember, or care to remember, that the Americans had been allies against Hitler. Konstantin did, though he didn’t say so-admitting such things wasn’t just dangerous, it was suicidal. The officer went on, “It’s looking more and more as though they think they’ll have to use atomic weapons to stop the advance of the victorious Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In his wisdom, Comrade Stalin has decided that the Soviet Union will not sit idly by while the imperialists assail a fraternal socialist state.”
One of the signs Gurevich was still wet behind the ears was that he could bring out propaganda slogans as if they were part of his ordinary language. He hadn’t seen enough of the real world to know that slogans were like the old newspaper you wrapped around makhorka to roll yourself a cigarette. They held things together, but they weren’t why you smoked. The tobacco was.
“If the Americans use atomic bombs, we will, too?” Morozov asked, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t know much about them. But from everything he’d heard, the best way to live through one was not to be there when it went off.
“We will take whatever steps the wise Comrade Stalin decides we have to take,” Captain Gurevich replied, so he didn’t know, either. Chances were no one did, except the longtime leader of the Soviet Union.
Something else occurred to Morozov: “If our tanks head west and go over the border, will the Americans drop one of these bombs on us? Or more than one?” One will be all it takes, he thought unhappily.
“We will not go forward alone if we get the order to liberate the American zone,” Gurevich said. “The Red Air Force will move with us, and will give us the air support we need.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said once more. That was more polite than You’ve got to be out of your goddamn mind, sir, even if, here, it meant the same thing. By the way Captain Gurevich turned red, he understood the words behind the words. That could be good. Maybe he wasn’t a total dope after all.