He and Tsederbaum walked up three wooden steps to the mess hall. His nose twitched as soon as he opened the door. A cook with a ladle stood next to an enormous cauldron of borscht. Another stood next to an equally enormous cauldron of shchi. Beet soup or cabbage soup? That had been the Russian question for as long as there’d been Russians. The cauldron of kasha-buckwheat groats-was smaller but still formidable. There was also black bread and peppery sausage coiled like rope.
Gribkov loaded up his tray. So did Tsederbaum. They both took twenty or twenty-five centimeters’ worth of sausage. The stuff was bound to have pork in it. Gribkov couldn’t imagine a Soviet military kitchen worrying about kosher food. To Russian military cooks, the meals they turned out were like gasoline: fuel for the body, nothing more.
He didn’t say anything about it to Leonid Tsederbaum. The Jew had to know what kind of meat went into the sausage-and the shchi, and the borscht-as well as he did. If Tsederbaum didn’t care, that was the navigator’s business.
Glasses of tea from a samovar completed the meal. Gribkov and Tsederbaum spooned in sugar, then sat down on one of the long benches and ate. It wasn’t the kind of meal anyone would go looking for in a restaurant. All the same, Gribkov knew he was getting more food and better food than most civilians did.
“What now?” Tsederbaum asked after they put their dishes in a basin and their trays on a mountainous stack.
“I don’t know. What now?” Gribkov answered. “We spent all that time getting ready to fly the mission. Then we went and flew it. And we didn’t just fly it-we came back from it.”
“And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Tsederbaum continued for him.
“And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Gribkov agreed. “So we wait around till they make up their minds.”
“Let’s go outside,” Tsederbaum said. When they couldn’t be easily overheard, he went on, “Do you want to bomb Paris or London or Rome?”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which was never the wrong answer. But it wasn’t always enough of the right answer. After a moment, he went on, “Do I want to? Of course not. Who in his right mind could? Will I, if they give me the order? I will, because I do serve the Soviet Union. And I’ll worry about what I want some other time.”
Leonid Tsederbaum opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever went on behind his eyes, Gribkov couldn’t read it. A couple of seconds later, he tried again: “That’s a good answer, Comrade Pilot.”
“How about you?” Gribkov wasn’t happy about the way the navigator had put him on the spot. “What would you do if they gave us an order like that?”
“Oh, I’d get the plane where it was supposed to go,” Tsederbaum replied. “After all, I’ve already done it once. And I’m a great coward.”
“I don’t think so!” Whatever Gribkov had expected, that wasn’t it.
“Oh, but I am,” Tsederbaum said. “If my choice is between a bullet in the back of the neck now and generations yet unborn spitting on my name later, they can spit all they please.”
“It isn’t like that,” Gribkov insisted. “We’d be doing it for the proletarian cause, for the socialist cause.”
“If you say so.”
“We would!”
“Even if we would, do you think anyone would be glad to remember us for melting the Eiffel Tower down to a stump about this high?” Tsederbaum drew a line across his own belly, just above his navel.
Gribkov winced. He couldn’t help it. Even so, he said, “That didn’t stop the Americans from hammering the Kremlin. If they’re hard, we have to be hard, too.”
“I understand that, Comrade Pilot. Just because I understand it doesn’t mean I like it,” Tsederbaum said. “And do you think for a minute that those American pilots don’t have bad dreams, too?”
The too was what pierced Gribkov to the root. He hadn’t told anybody about his fiery dreams. He most assuredly hadn’t told Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum. Yet the Jew knew. He knew much too well.
–
The Yanks were back at the Owl and Unicorn! So were the RAF men who flew out of Sculthorpe with them. Daisy Baxter cared more about the Americans. April would indeed have been the cruellest month without them. Her own countrymen were a thrifty lot, keeping tabs on every ha’penny and turning loose of it only when it was forcibly extracted, as if by a dentist’s grippers.
Americans, though…Americans spent as if there was no tomorrow. The base remained on high alert. The people who gave orders, though, discovered that the men who carried them out were human beings, and needed an escape valve to relieve the pressure of what they did. Except perhaps for a brothel, a pub was the best escape valve around.
“You gotta make that getaway turn as quick as you can, you know?” an American said, his accent sharp and hard. He used his hands to show what he meant, continuing, “If you don’t, if the blast wave catches you when you’re halfway through it, it’ll flip you around like a leaf in a breeze.”
“That happens to you, you’re lucky-damn lucky-if you ever pull out again, too,” another Yank said.
Working the tap, trying to keep up with their orders for bitter, listening with no more than half an ear, Daisy needed longer than she might have to realize they were talking about the blast wave from an atomic explosion. No wonder they spent as if there was no tomorrow! For the people they visited, there wasn’t.
A man at a slaughterhouse could knock cattle or sheep over the head day after day for years and years without ever thinking about what he was doing. Back in bygone times, executioners had hanged people the same way. But you needed imagination to be a good flyer. And if you had it, how could you help thinking about what you were doing?
An American first lieutenant she hadn’t seen before asked her for a pint. She drew it for him. He gave her a crown. When she started to return his change, he waved it away. “All funny money anyhow,” he said.
“Well, thanks very much.” She wondered if he knew how much he was overpaying. A lot of Americans, used to decimal coinage, had trouble with Britain’s more arcane system. If he did know, he didn’t care.
“Mud in your eye.” He raised the pint in salute, then started to take a long pull. But he stopped in surprise before it was well begun. He stared at the deep-amber liquid in the mug with sudden, astonished admiration and blurted, “This is good beer!”
“Glad you like it.” Daisy hid a smile. She’d seen that reaction before from Americans downing their first pint of best bitter.
This Yank had more enthusiasm than most. “I mean to tell you, Miss, this is good beer,” he said again. “The stuff you get in bottles in America, it tastes like they strain it through the kidneys of a horse-a sick horse, too. Draft beer’s a little better, but only a little. This here, though, this is great.” By the way he finished the pint, he meant every word of that.
“We aim to please.” Now Daisy did smile. She couldn’t help it, not with such an enthusiastic customer.
“Sweetheart, you hit the bull’s-eye.” She’d gone from Miss to Sweetheart in a couple of sentences. Well, beer and enthusiasm could do that. Having mentioned a bull’s-eye, the American waved toward the dartboard down at the end of the snug. Pete Huntington, a local man, was matched with an American sergeant. The Yank had some idea of what he was about. That put him ahead of most of his countrymen, who thought of darts as nothing more than a silly lark. But Pete was taking him to the cleaners just the same. No one would have told the sergeant his foe won tournaments all over East Anglia. The U.S. Air Force man standing in front of Daisy said, “Let me have another glass of this…what do you call it?”
He didn’t even know that. He was a new fish, all right. “Best bitter,” Daisy said patiently.
“You got that right!” He grinned and nodded. “It is the best-you better believe it!” He slid another fat silver coin at Daisy. “Big old coin,” he remarked, eyeing it. “Bigger than a cartwheel.”