However it sounded, it just made Gergely roll his eyes. “He’s here, you stupid sack of shit. He’s got our uniform on. He carries a rifle just like yours. He points it at the enemies of the Hungarian People’s Republic. From everything I’ve seen, he’s done fine since we came over the border. You haven’t exactly been the world’s biggest hero, so keep your fucking trap shut till you are, right?” Andras didn’t say anything. Sergeant Gergely fixed him with a stare like twin flamethrowers. “Right?”
“Uh, right, Comrade Sergeant.” The soldier looked as if he wished he’d never opened his mouth. He also looked as if he wished the ground would open up and swallow him. There Szolovits sympathized. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t felt the same way himself plenty of times.
The next interesting question was whether Andras Orban would decide that bothering him was more trouble than it was worth, or whether the other soldier would want to get even. Szolovits had never wished harm on anybody from his own unit, but in Andras’ case he might make an exception.
As evening fell, he took his turn in a foxhole a couple of hundred meters west of the main Hungarian position. In case the Americans or the Germans tried a sneak attack, he could give the alarm and start shooting…unless they were too sneaky, and murdered him before he got the chance.
Just to ensure that he’d be able to spot them from a long way away, rain started coming down no more than ten minutes after he went out there. He buttoned up his greatcoat collar tight, to keep out as many drips as he could. The fabric was supposed to be waterproof, but it wasn’t.
He remembered German motorcyclists scooting through Budapest before the city fell to the Russians. They’d worn rubberized greatcoats that really did shed water. Next to those, his was-and performed like-a cheap imitation.
He thought about lighting a cigarette, but didn’t bother. In the wet, he doubted he could keep it going long enough to get any enjoyment from it. The bottom of the hole turned muddy. Puddles started forming. His boots were supposed to be waterproof, too. From what he’d seen so far, they came closer than the greatcoat did, anyhow.
As long as the Americans stayed farther than ten meters or so from his post, they could hit the Hungarian troops behind him with a whole armored division, and he’d never know it till the shooting started. The way the rain was coming down, even that might not do it. He pushed the helmet farther forward on his head so the drips from the brim wouldn’t hit his nose. But that made the drips from the rear of the helmet dribble down the back of his neck, so he fiddled with it again.
Was that a noise? Would the Americans be daft enough to try something on such a miserable night? Clutching his rifle, he called, “Halt! Who goes? Give the password!” He hoped he didn’t sound too much like a scared kid. If those were Americans or Germans, they wouldn’t understand Magyar, and they would open up on him.
But, like a sign from the heavens, the password did come, followed by a wry chuckle he knew too well. “Just wanted to see if you were on your toes,” Sergeant Gergely said.
“Of course I am,” Szolovits answered, giddy with relief. “If I weren’t, I’d be drowning in here.”
“Cute,” Gergely said, but he chuckled again. After a moment, he went on, “You know, I was gonna bump Nagy up to lance-corporal till he caught one.”
“I’m not surprised,” Isztvan said, though he was surprised the sergeant told him. “Tibor was a good guy.” He hadn’t even thought about how much he missed the fallen soldier. It wasn’t that he hadn’t let himself, only that he’d been too busy trying to stay alive in his own right.
“What I’m thinking now is, maybe you’re the one I ought to tap for that slot,” Gergely said slowly.
What Isztvan Szolovits was thinking now was that, when the sergeant was fighting for Ferenc Szalasi’s Arrow Cross regime, Gergely would have shoved him into a train bound for Auschwitz and then toasted the departure with a glass of Tokay. Life could get very peculiar. So could the way people talked to each other. Szolovits came out with as much as he thought he could: “In spite of everything?”
“Yeah, in spite of everything.” The noncom didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “You’ve got your head on straight, and that counts for more than whether your cock’s clipped.”
“Gosh, Sergeant, you say the sweetest things,” Isztvan said.
This time, Gergely laughed out loud, which didn’t happen every day. “Menj a halál faszára,” he said. Szolovits hadn’t dreamt anyone could tell him to go sit on death’s dick and sound affectionate doing it, but Sergeant Gergely managed.
“What happens if you promote me and I order somebody to do something and he tells me that?” Szolovits asked. “Somebody like, oh, Andras?”
“Well, there’s two things you can do. You can tell me, and I’ll take care of it. Or you can whale the shit out of the pussy yourself and go on about your business. The less a sergeant hears about the little stuff, the happier he is.”
Isztvan wasn’t sure he could whale the shit out of Andras Orban. He was ready to try, though; a Jew who wasn’t ready to fight in post-Fascist Hungary would be a doormat all his life. You did what you had to do, not what you wanted to do.
Gergely’s other comment was also interesting. Szolovits asked, “Is the captain happy when he doesn’t hear much from you?”
“Sure he is,” Gergely answered. “He doesn’t hear about picky crap because I take care of it. The colonel doesn’t want to hear about garbage the captain ought to handle, either. Hell, you think Stalin wants to listen to arguments about which army goes into which front? That’s why he’s got generals, for Christ’s sake.”
“I…hadn’t thought much about what Stalin wants,” Szolovits said. If he had thought about it, it was to assume that whatever Stalin wanted, he got.
“In that case, you’re even. Stalin hasn’t thought about what you want, either.” Gergely chuckled once more. So did Isztvan, dutifully. A superior’s jokes were always funny.
–
When you looked at a kolkhoz, you saw the residence halls and the barns and the other buildings at the center. Spreading out from them, you saw fields of grain and meadows where the collective farm’s cattle and sheep grazed. As Ihor Shevchenko knew, you also saw that the buildings were shabby and faded and that no one worked like a Stakhanovite to bring in extra cubic meters of barley or to get the cows to give extra liters of milk.
What was the point? If you did work like a Stakhanovite, the state would take the crop and whatever it needed from the livestock. You wouldn’t get anything extra for doing more. You wouldn’t get in trouble for doing less, not unless you did so very little that the commissars couldn’t even pretend you weren’t sitting there playing with your dick. So people did as little as they could to get by, or maybe a touch less than that.
Almost everywhere on the kolkhoz, that was so. It was so almost everywhere on every kolkhoz anywhere in the Soviet Union, and on the collective farms that had sprouted in Stalin’s Eastern European satellites after the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Ihor didn’t know whether the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea boasted kolkhozes of their own. If they did, it was bound to be true almost everywhere on those collective farms as well.
Almost. Near the buildings at any kolkhoz, women tended tiny private plots. No careless turning of the soil there. No slipshod weeding. What they grew on those little plots, they could keep. They could eat it themselves or take it to unofficial markets and sell it or trade it for things they needed but wouldn’t get through regular channels for years, if ever.
As women raised carrots or cucumbers or tomatoes or radishes or onions or lettuces on their plots, the men on collective farms tended to a pig or two or some chickens or ducks. Those animals, those birds, had care lavished on them that the beasts the kolkhoz as a whole was responsible for never saw. When you slaughtered your own pig, you made damn sure it had a nice layer of tasty fat under its hide. A scrawny, razor-backed collective-farm pig? Who wanted a beast like that?