Fayvl Tabakman and his friend Yitzkhak came by. They talked with each other in Yiddish till they saw Marian waving to them. Then they immediately switched to English. “Here-you can wait with us if you want to,” Marian said.
“Thank you, but we should go to the end of the line,” Tabakman said. Yitzkhak nodded. The cobbler went on, “No one likes somebody who jumps his place.”
“Cuts,” Yitzkhak corrected him. “They say ‘cuts in line’ in English.”
“You’re right. They do.” Fayvl thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to show what an idiot he was.
“In places where there is not enough food to begin with, it may matter more than it does here, where there is usually enough,” Yitzkhak added. “But you make yourself no friends doing it anywhere.” He and Fayvl Tabakman touched forefingers to the brims of their cloth caps, then walked on.
They’d invited Marian and Linda to join them when they were ahead in line. She’d done it without thinking twice. Now she wondered if she should have thought twice. Did people talk about her because she took cuts? She was a mother with a little girl, but even so….
After she and Linda got their ration packs-Linda’s was cut down to child-size; the powers that be wouldn’t let anybody get away with overeating because of a kid-they saved places at one of the long tables for Fayvl and Yitzkhak. No one grumbled about that; people did it all the time.
Halfway through yet another military ration, Yitzkhak remarked, “I don’t like lining up for food, you know? It makes me remember the last time I had to do it.” He also had a number on his arm.
“Food now is better. More of it, too,” Fayvl Tabakman said. “What the little girl has there, that would have fed one of us for a week.”
“Ah, you’re stretching things,” Yitzkhak said. “Six days at most.” He smiled to show he was kidding. The smile never reached his eyes. Marian decided he wasn’t kidding very much.
“They aren’t trying to work us to death here, neither,” Tabakman said. “If they didn’t manage that, they just got rid of us, the way we’ll get rid of the trash from lunch.”
“How could people do that to other people?” Marian asked.
“I’m the wrong one to answer that,” the cobbler said. “The ones who should answer it are the Nazis. Only now, what’s left of the mamzrim are on the same side of us.” He screwed up his face as if at a bad smell. Marian decided against asking what mamzrim were.
“Nu, you’re not wrong, but the Russians, they’re no bargain, either,” Yitzkhak said. “Lucky me, I was in camps from both sides over there. Such luck! You wound up in one of Stalin’s, they wouldn’t kill you because you were a Jew. They wouldn’t even put you in because you were a Jew. You’d go in because they said you were a reactionary.”
“What’s that?” Linda asked.
“Anything they said it was,” Yitzkhak told her. Tabakman nodded. Yitzkhak went on, “And they didn’t kill you with poison gas or anything fancy. They just worked you till you dropped or else shot you. Maybe not so bad as the Nazis, but like I say no bargain. And they got Germans on their side, too. Feh!” As Fayvl had before him, he mimed smelling something foul.
Marian didn’t even know which questions to ask them. Had she known, she wouldn’t have had the nerve. She was just an American: someone who’d been comfortable her whole life till the bomb hit Seattle, and who only thought she and her daughter were uncomfortable now. Next to what these two men had known, this camp was a rest cure.
Fayvl Tabakman walked her and Linda back to the Studebaker near the edge of the encampment. When they got close, Marian let out a yelp: “Hey!” Some young punk with pimples and a greasy pompadour was messing with the door on the driver’s side. She yelled “Hey!” again, louder and more angrily.
The would-be thief looked up again from what he was doing. He had some kind of pry bar in his hand. Seeing only a woman, a little girl, and a small, skinny man, he let out a yell of his own-a thirteen-letter unendearment-and rushed them, waving the bar.
Marian shoved Linda behind her. Tabakman bent, picked up a rock about the size of a baseball, and let fly. He hadn’t played baseball wherever he came from, but he knew how to throw. It caught the kid right in the nose. He started to grab at himself, but fell on his face, out cold, before the motion was well begun.
“Go get a camp cop or a Guardsman,” the cobbler said calmly. “This jerk needs real trouble, or he’ll come around bothering you again.”
“Okay.” Marian stared at him. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“With grenades,” he answered, calm still. “Go on, now.” Marian went, herding Linda with her. Tabakman stayed right there, in case the thief came to. Marian didn’t think he would.
–
Konstantin Morozov’s new T-54 wasn’t new as in coming right off the factory floor. It had already seen hard action. He knew as much as soon as he slid down into the fighting compartment from the hatch atop the cupola. The inside of the tank stank of kerosene.
He’d discovered in the last war why repair crews used that stunt. If a crew got chewed to sausage meat by an armor-piercing round that did its job, you could weld a patch into place on the steel outside. And you could clean up whatever was left of the poor sorry pricks who’d got killed. But blood and bits of flesh would linger no matter how well you cleaned things out. Pretty soon, the fighting compartment would start smelling as if you’d forgotten a kilo of pork in there for a couple of weeks.
So after the repairmen did the best they could with the tank crew’s mortal remains, they would swab down the inside of the fighting compartment with a mop soaked in kerosene or gasoline. Konstantin didn’t know whether that actually killed the dead-meat stench or just overwhelmed it. Kerosene wasn’t what he would have called a pleasant odor. Next to what he could have been smelling in there, it seemed ambrosial.
When he stuck his head out again, the look on his face must have shown what was going through his mind. The corporal at the tank park who’d led him out to the T-54 donned a faintly embarrassed expression. “You’ve been through the mill a time or two, haven’t you, Comrade Sergeant?” he said. “Sorry about that, but we do want to get ’em back into action if we can.”
“Yes, yes,” Morozov said. “Show me where this pussy got it the last time, why don’t you?”
That why don’t you? made the order polite, but an order it remained. The corporal took him to the front of the tank and pointed out to him the rough patch under some new greenish-brown paint. That AP round wouldn’t just have penetrated the frontal armor. It would have slammed through the driver and the back of his seat on its way to tearing up the rest of the interior.
Thoughtfully, Morozov said, “I think I’ll hang some spare track links or something in front of that. I don’t know it’s a weak spot in the armor, but why take chances?”
“Sounds like a good idea to me.” The corporal gave him a sidelong look. “And I like the way you said that-so it wouldn’t piss me off if I happened to be a welder. I’m not, but just the same…. ”
“Life is too short when you start quarreling with the guys who’re supposed to be on your side,” Konstantin answered. “Doesn’t the enemy give us enough grief?” He set his palm on the weld.
“Did your crew get out with you?” the corporal asked.
“We all got out-we took a hit in the engine compartment. My driver was wounded before we made it to cover, though, so I have a new man there.” Morozov resolved not to say anything about the welded spot to Yevgeny Ushakov for a while. The replacement driver was barely eighteen. He’d have enough trouble telling left from right and getting into the proper gear. He didn’t need to dwell on what had happened to the man who’d sat in that seat before him.