When you took care of your own pig, it got as friendly as a dog. You got to like it. Or, at least, Ihor got to like the shoats he raised. But, while he got to like them as animals, he knew he would like them even better as meat. So he patted this one’s head and scratched its ears, but he had a knife in his other hand even so.
“Sorry, Nestor,” he said. Nestor snuffled. He was good-natured even for a pampered private pig. That wouldn’t do him any good, but he didn’t know it. Plenty of good-natured people had tried to stay friendly when the Chekists grabbed them in the great purges before the Hitlerite war. They turned into sausages, too. Ihor turned to Anya. “Bucket ready?”
“Right here.” She tapped the galvanized pail with the side of her foot.
“Dobre,” Ihor said. “Put it in place.” Steering it like a footballer, she slid it under Nestor’s neck. Ihor patted the pig one more time. Then he cut its throat.
He hung on while Nestor thrashed and made horrified drowning noises. Red and hot and iron-smelling, blood poured into the bucket. After half a minute or so, the pig went limp. Ihor thought about blood pudding and blood sausages and ham and ribs and chops and potatoes fried in lard.
He waited till he was sure Nestor was gone before gutting the pig. He didn’t want it to suffer any more than it had to. He’d seen too many suffering men during the war to care to inflict needless pain. Some people didn’t care. They were the ones who hit their dogs and kicked their cats after they fought with their wives. It’s only a dumb animal, they would say. Ihor thought they were the dumb animals.
Guts meant sausage casings and chitterlings. Liver, kidneys…The less you wasted, the more you had.
Another kolkhoznik ambled by as Ihor went on with the butchering. “You’re my good, true friend, aren’t you, Ihor?” he called.
“Mykola, you look like a hound sitting in front of a butcher’s window with its tongue hanging out,” Ihor said.
“The hound hopes he gets some scraps. So do I.” Mykola threw back his head and howled.
“We’ll see what we can work out,” Ihor said. Mykola wasn’t anywhere close to the best pigkeeper or chicken farmer on the collective farm. But his clever hands could fix anything that broke. When you had something somebody wanted and he could do things for you, you’d cook up some kind of deal.
Meat to eat fresh, meat to salt, meat to smoke, meat to pickle, fat to render…Nestor would keep Ihor’s belly full, and Anya’s, for quite a while. Even so, they wouldn’t be able to eat all of him by themselves. Some would get traded to Mykola and other people like him.
And Ihor took a slab of ribs to Petro Hapochka. In the days of the Tsars, Petro would have been a village headman. Most of the Ukrainians who had been village headmen then died in Stalin’s famine. Hapochka’s title was kolkhoz chairman. He had to deal with more senior Soviet functionaries at the oblast level. But on the collective farm he did what a village headman would have done in his village in the old days. He made sure the work that had to be done got done. He kept quarrels among the kolkhozniks from getting out of hand. He tried to stop drunks from gumming up the works.
He also got the rewards a village headman would have in the old days. If you didn’t want your life to be one nuisance after another, you kept him sweet. No law said you had to. Laws, in fact, said you had to do no such thing. The USSR’s constitution made it look like the freest country in the world. You couldn’t count on what laws said.
“Bozhemoi, Ihor, what have you got there?” he said when Ihor came up to him. Petro was in his late forties. He walked with a limp worse than Ihor’s, and well he might have: he’d lost his left foot in a German minefield in the fighting near Voronezh in 1943.
“I finally went and slaughtered Nestor,” Ihor answered. “I figured you might find somebody on the kolkhoz who could use these.”
“I might. Tak, I just might.” That Hapochka used Ukrainian showed he was pleased; Russian was the tongue of official formality. Had Ihor come out and said he was giving the chairman the ribs, that would have been bad form. Had Petro given any hint he would keep them for himself, that also would have been bad manners. They understood each other, and the game, perfectly well.
“Comrade Chairman…?” Ihor switched gears.
“What is it?” Hapochka’s tone was expansive, not suspicious. Those ribs paid for a question or two.
“Do the people who’re supposed to know such things know when they’ll put Kiev back together again?”
“Nobody has any idea, Ihor. Not a hint. Some of the people who would plan things like that were in Kiev when the bomb hit. They aren’t there any more.” A village headman would have crossed himself. Petro didn’t, but looked as if he wanted to. He went on, “And the people who would have told the people in Kiev what to do were in Moscow, and Moscow took a worse pasting than Kiev.”
“That’s what I’ve heard, too.” Ihor had mixed feelings about Moscow, as which Ukrainian did not? Moscow forced them to be part of a country where they weren’t quite first-class citizens. Then again, Moscow had saved them from being part of a country where they’d get worked like draft animals and knocked over the head if they faltered. Next to Hitler, Stalin seemed a bargain. Before the Great Patriotic War, who could have imagined that?
“We just have to go on about our business till things straighten out,” Petro said. “Sooner or later, they will. They’re bound to.”
“Sure, Comrade Chairman.” Ihor nodded. He wondered whether either of them believed it.
–
Herschel Weissman puffed on his Havana and said, “We have an order for a refrigerator down in Torrance.”
“We do?” Aaron Finch said, in place of telling his boss You’re kidding me, right? If you drew a line between the Blue Front warehouse and the South Bay suburb of Torrance, downtown Los Angeles would be somewhere close to the middle. Or rather, it would have been till the Russian A-bomb forcibly removed it from the map.
“We do,” Weissman said. “I want you and Jim to take the truck down there. You do the driving. It’s liable to be too complicated for him.”
“How did we get the order, anyway?” Aaron asked. Telephone connections between that part of the L.A. area and this one weren’t just spotty. For the most part, they didn’t exist.
“The lady wrote me a letter,” Weissman answered. “A very nice letter. It got from there to here. Since it did, I expect you can get from here to there.”
“A letter doesn’t have to worry about radiation sickness.”
“Maybe not, but the people who carry it do. It’s okay if you go around downtown, Aaron.”
“Thanks a bunch!” Aaron said. Weissman was feeling generous, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just okay for him to skirt downtown. It was mandatory. Inside a circle more than a mile wide, there not only weren’t any roads, there wasn’t much of anything. Inside a considerably wider circle, the road hadn’t been cleared of all the buildings and poles and walls and fences the explosion had littered them with. People had been evacuated from a wider circle yet, a circle without electricity or running water. They filled three or four town-sized refugee camps.
You could say that area centered on downtown was a circle the twentieth century didn’t touch. But the twentieth century had touched it pretty goddamn hard if you looked at things another way.
Jim Summers grumbled, “I oughta wear my lead-lined skivvies for a trip like this.”