“Moo!” Three different people in the common room said the same thing at the same time. Everyone giggled, even though Radio Moscow followed the news with Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the one he wrote in response to the Hitlerites’ siege of Leningrad. Normally, you wouldn’t want to laugh while that music poured out of the speaker.
Normally…but not this minute. Everyone in the kolkhoz lived in the shadow of things more terrible, or at any rate more instantaneously terrible, than Shostakovich had known while penning his great symphony. And when you lived in that shadow, you laughed when you could, to help hold it at bay. Any excuse would do. A newsreader mouthing silly slogans with a silly accent was as much as anyone needed.
Once upon a time, people had believed in the silly slogans. People had died for their sake, they’d believed with such passion. They’d gone to the gulag for them.
In the world of true Communism, there would be no gulags. Ihor chuckled again. That was pretty funny, too.
21
Why am I here? Isztvan Szolovits wondered. The question was worth asking, on any number of levels. What kind of answer you got depended on how you asked it, which was true of most questions. A believing religious person (a dangerous thing to be in the Hungarian People’s Republic, but not quite illegal as long as you didn’t make a public fuss about it) would say he was here because God had placed him here as part of the divine plan. An existentialist would haughtily declare that such questions had no meaning.
Isztvan knew less than he would have liked about existentialism. The Horthy regime had frowned on such decadent fripperies. So did the Red regime that took its place a couple of years after the war ended. But for those couple of years, Hungary had been Russian-occupied but not yet officially Communist. The new notions from Paris got in and…They were exciting, till suddenly you couldn’t mention them any more if you knew what was good for you.
But for Isztvan right now, Why am I here? meant Why am I in a muddy trench in the middle of Germany with the Americans raining artillery down on my head? In a way, he knew the answer. His own country’s secret police would have tortured him or killed him if he hadn’t let himself be conscripted. Their Russian overlords would have tortured or killed them had they shirked.
A big one-probably a 155-slammed into the ground ten or twenty meters in front of the trenches. Everything shook. Blast made breathing hard for a moment. A little closer and it could have killed, sometimes without leaving a mark. Fragments screeched overhead. Mud flew into the air and thumped down in the trench.
He cowered in the dugout he’d scraped in the forward wall. He’d shored it up with wood the best way he knew how. If the best way he knew how wasn’t good enough, it would collapse on him, and that would be that. A little closer and it might have collapsed anyhow.
In the dugout next to his, a Pole told his rosary beads and gabbled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Isztvan recognized the Latin. He’d studied some. The Pole’s pronunciation seemed strange to him, but he wasn’t about to say so. He doubted the Polish soldier would have appreciated Latin lessons from a Christ-killing clipcock.
Any Jew who lived in Hungary heard such endearments. Any Jew who lived in Hungary while the Arrow Cross maniacs did Hitler’s bidding heard them screamed in his face. Very often, they were some of the last things he ever heard.
The Communists didn’t call Jews names like that. Several big shots of the Hungarian People’s Republic, including Matyas Rakosi, who ruled the country, were Jews-exiles returned from Russia or survivors like Isztvan. They were not, of course, observant Jews or even indifferent Jews like Isztvan. They were ready to go after their own kind, knowing Stalin would come after them if they didn’t. They didn’t talk about Christ-killers. They talked about rootless cosmopolites instead. It sounded much more scientific. In practice? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Along with the heavy stuff, the Americans were throwing mortars around. Isztvan had quickly learned to hate mortars. You hardly knew the bombs were coming in till they burst, and they could fall straight down into a foxhole or trench.
They could, and this one did. It burst right behind the Pole in the dugout next to Isztvan’s. The boom shook him. A fragment of hot metal buried itself in the mud a few centimeters in front of his nose. Another one, smaller, drew a bleeding line across the back of his hand. And one more, smaller still, clinked off his helmet. Like most people who’d seen both, he liked the German model better than its Soviet counterpart. But the Red Army lid did what it was made to do. Nobody’s helmet would stop a bullet. Fragments? Yes.
He was so stunned-and so deafened by the near miss-he needed a couple of seconds to hear someone screaming, and a couple of seconds more to realize it was the Pole who’d sheltered in the dugout next to his. Though other bombs were still falling all around, Szolovits scrambled out of his shelter to do what he could for the foreigner who was here in a war no more his than the Hungarian soldier’s.
“Oh,” Isztvan said, and then, “Oh, God.” He’d already seen some things he’d be trying to forget for the rest of his life. This was worse than all of them put together.
He didn’t want to look. He wanted retroactively not to have looked. It was that bad. It was…he didn’t know what it was. He’d never dreamt even iron and explosives fired with bad intent could do-that-to a man.
Worst of all, despite mutilating the Pole as ingeniously as any torturer might have, the mortar bomb hadn’t killed him. He wailed and moaned and shrieked and clutched at himself, trying to put himself back together. He wouldn’t be in one piece again till the Christian Judgment Day at the earliest.
When the Pole wasn’t screaming, he was shouting and crying out in a language Isztvan didn’t speak. Some of that was prayer in Latin mixed with Polish. Some was-Isztvan didn’t know what it was. But if he’d been torn apart like that, he would have been howling for his mother.
If he’d been torn apart like that, he would have wanted something else, too. He would have given it to a tormented dog smashed by a tram. You could do it to a dog, though. With a man, you ought to make sure it was all right first.
Isztvan pulled the bayonet off his belt and held it in front of the Pole’s wild blue eyes. “Willst du?” he asked. Do you want me to? German was the only language the two of them might share.
He didn’t know the poor bastard spoke German. Even if the Pole did, he might be too far gone to follow now.
When his gashed mouth opened, more blood dribbled from the corner. But he choked out three clear words: “Ja. Bitte. Danke.” He tried to make the sign of the cross, but his right hand wasn’t attached any more.
“Ego te absolvo, filii,” Isztvan said. He wasn’t a priest, or even a Christian. He hoped the words would do the Pole a little good anyhow. In all the time since the beginning of the world, few men had been in unction this extreme. Not watching what he did, Isztvan cut the fellow’s throat.
The screaming stopped. Szolovits drew a deep breath. He plunged the bayonet into the dirt again and again to get the blood off it. It was a tool with all kinds of uses, though rarely as a spearpoint on the end of a rifle, its nominal purpose. He’d never thought he’d use it for that, though.
An unexpected hand on his shoulder made him jerk and start to use it as a fighting knife. No Americans in the trenches, though. It was Sergeant Gergely. “He shut up,” Gergely said. “You shut him up?”