“That’s desertion,” Tibor said automatically. “You know what they do to people who try to bug out on them.”
“That’s if we don’t make it convincing,” Szolovits said. “They’re sending us up there to fight. Wouldn’t you rather spend the rest of the war in a POW camp than in some scratched-out grave? Do you give a shit for Stalin and our fraternal socialist allies? C’mon!”
“If Gergely hears you, you’re dead meat. He’ll take care of that personally,” Tibor said.
“If you rat on me, I am. Otherwise? Maybe not,” the Jew returned. “You think Gergely doesn’t want to live, too? You think he isn’t figuring the angles? He’s so crooked, he can look down the crack of his own ass.”
Tibor snorted-not because Szolovits was wrong but because he was right. Anyone who could serve both the Arrow Cross and the Communist Party figured the angles better than a pool shark. If Tibor did rat on his fellow soldier, Szolovits would get it in the neck. And then? Then they’d commend Tibor and send him forward so he could get it in the neck, too. The Americans would give it to him, not his own people, but what difference did that make?
His heart sank when he saw soldiers in the forward trenches: Russians, dammit. A lieutenant came over to Sergeant Gergely and spoke to him in slow, accented German: “Half an hour from now, after artillery, we advance. You understand?”
Tibor hoped the sergeant would do as he’d done farther back, and pretend not to understand the only language a Magyar and a Russian were likely to have in common. But Gergely saluted, nodded, and said, “Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” He might have fallen straight out of Franz Joseph’s time.
“Gut, gut,” the young Soviet officer said. “You tell your men, so they know what to do.”
“Jawohl!” Gergely said, with another precise salute. He did everything but click his heels. Then he spoke in Magyar: “We go in in half an hour, after they shell the Americans. Good luck, boys! Stay as safe as you can.”
The Russian lieutenant sent him a fishy stare. Few who weren’t Hungarians learned Magyar. It had no close cousins in Europe. But that lieutenant might have understood more than he let on. Well, even if he did, Sergeant Gergely hadn’t said anything to upset him. You weren’t going to tell the soldiers you led to go out and get themselves killed as fast as they could.
Freight-train noises in the air, thunder on the ground: big shells flying in to tear at the Americans’ lines. From things Sergeant Gergely had said, the Red Army had always been strong in artillery. This wasn’t a crush-everything barrage. It was just designed to knock the Americans back on their heels. The infantry would do the hard work.
That Russian junior officer stuck a brass whistle in his mouth and blew a long, shrill blast. He yelled something in his own language and shouted “Forward!” in German for the Magyars’ benefit. Then he scrambled out of the trench and ran toward the Americans’ holes. His men followed. So did Tibor and his countrymen.
Bullets cracked past him. He clamped down on his bladder and his anus as hard as he could. Not five meters from him, Gyula Pusztai went down with a bubbling wail, clutching at his midsection. The big man thrashed like a cat hit by a car. He was no great brain, but how smart did you need to be to know you were dying in agony?
Tibor yanked the pin from a grenade and chucked it into the foxhole ahead of him. A Yank in there screamed just the way poor Gyula had. Tibor felt terrible. He’d been thinking about giving himself up to the Americans, not killing them.
That didn’t mean they weren’t still thinking about killing him. Their semiautomatic rifles fired faster than the bolt-action pieces he and his friends carried. A few of the Russians had submachine guns or assault rifles, which put still more rounds in the air, but only a few.
An American popped out from behind a bullet-pocked freezer. What the hell was that doing in the middle of a battlefield? Tibor swung his Mosin-Nagant toward the man in olive drab. The American fired first: three bullets, one right after another. Two caught Tibor in the chest. It hurt like hell, but only for a few seconds. Then merciful blackness swept down forever.
15
“Lunchtime, Mommy!” Linda said.
Marian Staley wondered how her daughter knew. Tummy Standard Time, she supposed. She didn’t have a watch. The Studebaker’s clock had quit a couple of months after she and Bill bought the car. She’d never seen an auto clock that wasn’t a piece of junk.
Linda didn’t know how to tell time anyway. That didn’t mean Tummy Standard Time wasn’t pretty good. Here and there, people were heading for the refugee camp’s mess hall. Maybe that helped give Linda a hint, too.
“Well, we can go,” Marian said. She rolled up the windows and made sure the Studebaker’s doors were locked. She didn’t have much in there, but she wanted to keep the little she did have. Someone could still break one of the windows and help himself, but that would-or at least might-make someone else notice and raise a ruckus. It hadn’t happened yet, for which Marian was duly grateful.
It wasn’t raining right this minute, but it was muddy. The stuff pulled at Marian’s shoes. She hadn’t known a day since they came here when it wasn’t muddy. She wished she could go somewhere, anywhere, else. Right at the moment, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go.
Three sets of stretcher-bearers carried bodies from the hospital tent toward the graveyard. One bunch came from the National Guard. The others were refugees working for their keep or because they were bored out of their skulls. The atom bomb’s poison kept on working even six weeks after the damn thing went off. Marian touched her face. She’d healed well enough, and so had Linda.
More and more people bombed out of their homes converged on the big tent that housed the mess hall, like iron filings drawn by a magnet. Here and there, somebody would nod to her. If it was somebody she knew, like Fayvl Tabakman or one of his friends, she would nod back. If it was some man trying his luck with a woman he’d never seen before because he liked the way she looked, she pretended not to see him. She had enough troubles as things were. She needed more like she needed a hole in the head.
When she realized what she’d thought, she smiled. That sounded like something Fayvl would say-as a matter of fact, it was something he did say. The cobbler with the number on his arm had rubbed off on her in ways she hadn’t even noticed.
Tummy Standard Time must have run a little fast. The line curled around the mess-hall tent, which hadn’t opened yet. “Phooey!” Linda said. She enjoyed waiting no more than any other four-year-old.
“Phooey is right,” Marian agreed. “Phooey and pfui!” The two terms of annoyance sounded just about the same. She meant something different by each one, though. Her phooey carried the same message as Linda’s. She didn’t like waiting in line, either. That was one of the reasons she loved the camp so much.
Her pfui, now…Another reason she couldn’t stand the place was that the people stuck here didn’t bathe as often as they should. She and Linda didn’t bathe all that often themselves. It wasn’t as if the camp had enough hot water. It also wasn’t as if you could bathe without hot water in this weather unless you wanted pneumonia or frostbite.
But Marian and her daughter were nowhere near the worst offenders, as she got forcibly reminded every time they had to queue up. Some people either didn’t notice they smelled like walking garbage piles or didn’t care. Some people, in fact, seemed to glory in their BO. Animals used piss and shit to mark their territories. Some of the stinkers seemed to use their bad smell the same way.
Not so long ago, a camp like this, with thousands of people crowded together and with only the most primitive plumbing arrangements, would have had all kinds of horrible diseases tearing through it. There wasn’t much of that. Drinking water carried so much chlorine, it tasted horrible, but it didn’t make anyone sick. National Guardsmen with DDT sprayers and Red Cross armbands went through the place once a week. Hardly anyone had lice or fleas. Health workers spread a thin film of oil over every nearby puddle they could find. It was probably still too cold for mosquitoes, but nobody was taking chances. So the inmates might be unhappy, but they weren’t unhealthy.