Marian didn’t want to contemplate it. It made all her unhappiness here seem like a small child’s temper tantrum. Maybe Americans were soft. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” he said, which was gracious of him. What was I’m sorry against the memory of watching your wife and children, everything that mattered most to you, go off to be murdered while you stood there unable to do a thing about it? How could you go on after that?
Fayvl had. Marian glanced at Moishe and Yitzkhak. Their faces were both closed, inward. What were they remembering? Nothing very different, she feared.
No wonder seeing her and Linda sometimes seemed to sadden Tabakman. They had to remind him of what the Nazis had stolen. She wondered what the Jew’s wife and children had looked like before…
Her mouth tightened. She shook her head a little, as if she were warning Linda to behave herself (not that Linda needed warning right now-she was fine). Whatever she asked Fayvl Tabakman, she would never ask him that.
–
“Attention, Moscow is speaking.” No, it wasn’t Yuri Levitan, even if it was his signature opening. And it wasn’t Moscow, either, even if it was Radio Moscow. Ihor Shevchenko had no idea where the signal originated. The Soviet Union was a vast place. There were plenty of possibilities.
He didn’t think much of the new chief newsreader. Roman Amfiteatrov had an annoying southern accent. He pronounced the letter O as if it really sounded like an o, rather than with the ah sound most Russian-speakers used. Ihor had fought alongside a few men like that. The other Russians said they sounded like mooing cows. Russian wasn’t quite Ihor’s language, but that accent seemed funny to him, too.
Amfiteatrov went on, “Today is Tuesday, May the first, 1951-the glorious holiday of oppressed peasants and workers all over the world. Red Army victories continue unabated, the troops fighting with great courage and passion for Marshal Stalin. Milan has now fallen to the Fifth Guards Tank Army, which is proceeding westward in the direction of Turin. Fierce fighting in Germany has also yielded further advances against the Fascists and imperialists.”
He named places in Italy. That meant there was some chance he was telling the truth about how things were going there. Further advances, by contrast, could mean anything. Or it could mean nothing. It could, and odds were it did. Anyone who got his news from Radio Moscow learned to read between the lines.
“In the North Atlantic, heroic Red Fleet submarines have struck heavy blows against the convoys sailing from America to its jackal lackey, England,” Amfiteatrov mooed triumphantly. “Ships have been sent to the bottom and convoys scattered. The naval link between the continents is being broken.”
Again, he was longer on claims than details. Ihor wondered how much the men in the submarines could actually see. He also wondered whether there actually were any men in submarines in, or under, the North Atlantic. No one here in the USSR would know if there weren’t.
He glanced around the common room. The other kolkhozniks were all listening attentively. They all looked happy about the victories Roman Amfiteatrov reported. Well, so did Ihor. Whatever doubts you might have inside the fortress of your mind, your face couldn’t show them. If it did, somebody would report you.
Fewer people had gone into the gulags after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Well, fewer Soviet citizens had. German and Japanese prisoners of war took up a good part of the slack. Had Ihor felt more sympathy for them, he might have wondered how many would ever see their motherlands again. Since he didn’t, his attitude was more along the lines of Better those sons of bitches than me.
“The bestial American aggressors, still slavering to spill the blood of innocent and peace-loving Soviet citizens, have sent their terror bombers over Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don,” Amfiteatrov intoned. “In the latter city, bombs fell on a child-rearing collective. More than a dozen young lives were snuffed out.”
Ihor’s first thought was that Kharkov (as a Ukrainian, he thought of it as Kharkiv) and Rostov-on-the-Don had already suffered enough, or more than enough. Both went back and forth between Hitlerite and Soviet forces twice in the last war. He knew not much of Kharkiv was left standing. He’d never been to Rostov-on-the-Don, but he didn’t think it would be in tip-top shape, either.
As for the child-rearing collective…Radio Moscow had made those claims before, too. Maybe they were true, maybe not. Ihor wasn’t in Kharkiv now. Since he wasn’t, how could he know for sure?
He couldn’t, and knew he couldn’t. He did remember that, in the last war, each side claimed the other made a point of massacring women and children. In the last war, the Nazis had really done it. So had the men of the Red Army, when they’d advanced far enough to get their hands on German women and children. Revenge spiced killing the way caraway seeds spiced pickled cabbage.
In the last war, the Americans hadn’t had that kind of reputation. If anything, they were supposed to be softies then, too slow to start the Second Front and too easy on the Fritzes. But they’d been allies then. Now they were the enemy, with Harry Truman playing the role of Hitler.
Roman Amfiteatrov blathered on. Truman had dropped atom bombs-a large number; Ihor didn’t know just how many-on the Soviet Union’s biggest cities. Even so, the kolkhoznik wasn’t sure whether they or the Germans had killed more of its people. Hitler hadn’t had the weapons Truman used, but no one could deny the force of his will. He kept the Germans fighting for a year and a half after more sensible people would have seen they had no chance.
Ihor consoled himself by remembering all the extra fighting had cost the Hitlerites millions of casualties they wouldn’t have taken had they surrendered. The trouble was, it had cost the USSR even more.
He’d heard the Nazis had killed 20,000,000 Soviet citizens. He’d also heard they’d killed 30,000,000. He had no idea which number to believe. He suspected no one else did, either.
He also had no idea how a country that had lost so many people-whichever enormous number came closer to truth-was supposed to pick itself up, dust itself off, and go on about its business. With Hitler’s savage regime shattered and prostrate at its feet, the USSR had actually done a decent job.
Now it was at war again. Now somewhere close to the same number of Soviet citizens, men and women who’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, were suddenly gone. So were the cities where they’d dwelt. More still died in the fighting in Germany and Italy.
Could any country that had lost somewhere between one in five and one in three of the people who’d been alive on 21 June 1941 stand on its own two feet here ten years later and still be a country? The USSR was doing it. How the USSR was doing it, Ihor had no idea.
He glanced over at Anya. She was chatting with the kolkhoz chairman’s wife. She must have said something funny, because Irina Hapochkova laughed till her plump cheeks turned even redder than usual. Anya’d almost gone to Kiev. She’d almost become part of the monstrous, murderous statistics. But she hadn’t, and because she hadn’t Ihor’s life still meant something to him.
Now Amfiteatrov was talking about how foresters and factory hands had smashed production norms all over the Soviet Union. The factory hands labored in places like Irkutsk, which was hard for American bombers to reach, and in towns like Vyazma, which wasn’t big enough for the bombers to waste A-bombs on it.
“And finally,” the newsreader said, “on this great day Comrade Stalin, the beloved leader of the people’s vanguard of revolutionary socialism, assures Soviet workers and peasants that, despite all the troubles we have had to overcome on the road to true Communism, the world-the entire world-will see it, and sooner than most people expect. The struggle continues. The struggle will be victorious. So the dialectic assures us. Thank you, and good evening.”