The Germans were the trouble, though, and the Ukrainians, and his own superiors. Fuck it, he thought. Nobody’s done for me yet.
He and half a platoon of soldiers cautiously entered a village the next day, not long after sunup. The peasants stared at them with expressionless faces. Ivan didn’t quite point his submachine gun at a guy with a cloth cap and a big, bushy white mustache. “How you doing, Grandpa?” he said. “Seen any Fritzes around here?”
Grandpa came back with a paragraph of Ukrainian. For all the good it did Kuchkov, it might as well have been Portuguese. He glanced at his own men to see if any of them made sense of it. Some Russian dialects were closer than his to the crap they spoke down here. A private said, “I think he says there haven’t been any around.”
That was what Ivan thought the old geezer’d said, too, but he hadn’t been even close to sure. He nodded-unpleasantly. “Search the houses, boys. We find any Nazi propaganda shit, we’ll clean out this whole whore of a place.” He rather looked forward to it.
One of the Ukrainian women screeched like a cat after a door got slammed on its tail. Grandpa put his head together with some of the other old farts. Only a couple of young men here. Maybe the rest were in the Red Army. Or maybe they’d run off to join the Hitlerite swine. You never could tell.
All at once, though, Grandpa spoke Russian an ordinary human being could understand: “Pavel here, he says maybe the Germans are that way, not too far.” He pointed west, then toward one of his drinking buddies. Pavel looked as if he didn’t need to be singled out.
Too bad, cocksucker, Kuchkov thought. “How do you know?” the sergeant growled. Pavel looked blank. That failed to impress Kuchkov. “How do you know, cuntface? You better sing out, ’cause you’ll be fucking sorry if you don’t.”
Pavel did: “In the fields yesterday afternoon, I saw dust from their tanks and trucks. Had to be theirs. None of yours in that direction.”
Yours should have been ours. Ivan could have nailed him for that. He would have, too, but he had bigger worries. “Just dust?” he snapped. “No soldiers?”
“Nyet,” Pavel said. “No soldiers.”
Ivan considered. If there had been Fritzes in eyeball range then, chances were his half-platoon would have had to clear them out of this pissy hole in the ground-or would have walked into an ambush, one. So chances were the local wasn’t bullshitting: not right this minute, anyhow.
“All right.” Kuchkov turned back to his men. “Georgi, you and Avram go half a kilometer out that way, see what the fuck you find. Go on. Get your sad asses moving. If you see Fritzes, Georgi, you come back and tell us. Otherwise both of you hang on there.”
Avram sent him a wounded look. Ivan pretended not to notice. Avram was a Hebe. You could count on him to fight the Germans. And he made a damn good point man, not least because he was so jumpy. If anybody could stay out there and not draw the enemy’s notice, he was the guy. Georgi was pretty good in the field, but not as good as the Jew. If the Nazis were coming up, Avram was the man to keep an eye on them.
Off they went, both glum. And well they might have been, because a Mauser barked almost as soon as they left the village. One of them-Ivan didn’t see which-fell. The other dove for cover. “We’ll fight ’em in here,” Kuchkov declared. “House to house if we have to. Misha, go back and tell the captain we need help doublemotherfucking quick. Scram!”
The Ukrainians started screeching again. They didn’t want their village smashed up. Well, how often in this lousy old world did you get what you wanted? He wanted to have a mortar team here, for instance. Wouldn’t that make the Fritzes howl!
He dashed into a tavern at the west end of the village. As soon as he did, he grabbed a bottle. This was a hell of a lot better than the Red Army’s daily hundred grams. He swigged and whistled. The vodka was better than the gasoline-tasting stuff the army issued, too.
He peered out through a knothole. Sure as hell, the Germans were coming up. Life sucked sometimes. He sucked, too, at the vodka bottle. Best thing in the world, except maybe a pretty girl’s tit. Smooth fire ran down his throat. He grabbed another bottle, just in case. In case of what? The Nazis had a Panzer II with them. Maybe he could turn the virgin bottle into a Molotov cocktail. Or maybe he’d go ahead and drink the son of a bitch.
The Panzer II sprayed the village with machine-gun bullets. Kuchkov had hoped the Fritz commanding it would be dumb enough to drive inside, but no such luck. One of his men fired at the tank from another house. The round clanged off steel, but so what? The enemy tank’s cannon fired several rounds into that house. No more rifle fire came from it. Maybe the soldier had learned his lesson. Maybe he wouldn’t need to learn any more lessons from now on.
But you couldn’t not shoot, not with the German foot soldiers advancing. They’d sure as hell shoot you. Kuchkov stuck the muzzle of his PPD-34 out through the knothole and gave them a burst. Then he threw himself flat on the rammed-earth floor.
Sure as shit, machine-gun bullets stitched through the woodwork half a meter above his head. Vodka bottles shattered noisily. “Fucking waste,” Ivan mourned.
Then he heard a noise like an accident in a machine shop-a bad accident. He put an eye up to one of the brand new holes in the wall. The Panzer II was blazing as if it had just gone to hell. The Fritzes on foot had stopped and were staring in the same horrified dismay he’d felt a moment earlier. Machine-gun bullets stitched through them from right to left. They all went down, some dead or wounded, others just sensibly hitting the dirt.
Sometimes your officers actually knew what they were doing. Sometimes you got lucky instead. A pair of brand new T-34s stopped the German advance on the village. The Nazis couldn’t do anything against the latest Soviet tanks. A Panzer II was nothing but a snack for their 76mm guns. The Fritzes who could legged it back to the west at top speed. And Ivan Kuchkov drank from his liberated vodka bottles till the newly ventilated tavern spun dizzily around him.
The Nazi official at the Munster Rathaus couldn’t have looked more disgusted if he’d found rotten, stinking fish on his supper plate and been compelled to eat it. Sarah Goldman didn’t care. If anything, she enjoyed seeing that look on his face. She wasn’t rash enough to show what she was thinking, of course.
Beside her stood Isidor Bruck. His features also stayed carefully blank. Behind him stood his parents, as Sarah’s mother and father stood behind her. Despite everything the Reich ’s bureaucracy could do to make things difficult for them, Sarah and Isidor had finally finished all their paperwork. They’d won the state’s very grudging permission to marry.
“Moses Isidor Bruck and Sarah Sarah Goldman”-the pen-pusher with the swastika armband used the first names the Nazis had forced all Jews to adopt (Sarah’s renaming with her own name never failed to make her giggle, at least inside)-“you have conformed with the requirements the Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party place on marriages for persons of the Hebrew religion. You have also paid all the necessary fees to complete the process.”
Sarah somehow felt her father stir behind her. She could tell what he was thinking. It wasn’t on account of the fees, which were fat. The professor in him wanted to correct the Nazi flunky for calling the religion “Hebrew.” For a heartbeat, she feared he would. He didn’t. Odds were no Jew in the Reich would have been so rash. But she knew he wanted to.
Scowling, the official went on, “This being so, the Reich recognizes and permits the marriage.” He glanced Sarah’s way. “You are now Sarah Sarah Bruck. Your identity card and records will be altered to reflect the new situation.”