Or was it, really? Wasn’t getting killed trying to take them off and then leaving them stuck for the Japs anyway worse still? An admiral was bound to think so. The admiral in charge of the fleet did think so. Pete was a Marine. For two cents’ change, he would have torn the goddamn admiral’s head off and pissed in the hole.
Married. When Sarah Goldman (no, she was Sarah Bruck now; she had to keep reminding herself she was Sarah Bruck) had thought about being married before she actually was, she hadn’t thought much about what came after she went through the ceremony. Oh, she’d thought about some of it, but you couldn’t do that all the time even when you were newlyweds and very young. She hadn’t thought about what her life would be like after the wedding.
She had expected she would eat better, and she did. The Brucks were bakers, after all. Even if they were Jews, even if the Nazis watched them three times as hard as the Aryan bakers in Munster, they found ways of making flour silently vanish from the official allocation. Some they baked into stuff they ate themselves. They traded the rest with other people who dealt in food. Nobody-nobody below the rank of General-major, anyhow-ate well in the Third Reich. But the Brucks did very well for Jews, and better than some Aryans.
Sarah hadn’t expected she would work so much harder. Isidor might have got himself a wife. His mother and father had got themselves a brand-new employee they didn’t have to pay. They made the most of it. She knew next to nothing about baking when she started sharing Isidor’s little room. They set about giving her a crash course.
To be fair, they started her on simple things, as if she were a child. She could tell time, obviously. They could trust her to open the ovens and take out the loaves after half an hour (they could also smear ointment on her hands when she burned herself doing it-it wasn’t as if they’d never got burned).
They could let her mix the various flours that went into war bread. “No, none of them is sawdust,” David Bruck assured her, amusement in his voice.
“Was there any in the last war?” she asked. “People always say there was.”
“There were things nobody talked about. The government issued them to us, and we used them. It was use them or not bake anything.” Isidor’s father no longer sounded or looked amused. “That was… a very hard time.”
“This isn’t?” Sarah’s flour-covered hand reached for but didn’t touch the six-pointed yellow star on her blouse.
David Bruck wore a star, too. He considered. “We were hungrier then, but we were happier, too. People weren’t banging on the tea kettle at us all the time because we were Jews.”
Sarah smiled. Her mother would use that homely phrase for raising a ruckus every now and then. Her father always looked pained when Mother did. It wasn’t the kind of thing Herr Doktor Professor Goldman was used to hearing, his expression said. Herr Doktor Professor Goldman was doing all kinds of things these days that he hadn’t been used to.
And so was Sarah. Besides the burns, unfamiliar work made her arms and shoulders ache. Her feet hurt because she was on them so much. She was tired all the time. She sometimes wondered if this was what she’d signed up for.
It would have been worse if she hadn’t seen that all the Brucks, Isidor included, drove themselves harder than they drove her. That made her feel silly about complaining. But she slept as if someone hit her over the head with a boulder as soon as she lay down.
When she slept. As the hours of darkness got longer, RAF bombers started showing up over Munster more often. There weren’t many of them, and they didn’t drop a lot of bombs, but they wrecked the nights when they appeared.
She and Isidor and his parents would go downstairs and huddle under the counters. It was no better than hiding under the dining-room table had been at her parents’. If a bomb knocked the building down on top of you, you’d get squashed. If one blew out a side wall, it would blow you up, too. The Aryans in the neighborhood, like the Aryans in her old neighborhood, had proper bomb shelters. Verboten for Jews, of course. Jews took their chances.
Isidor took his chances in the blackout darkness. She’d never got felt up during an air raid before. She wanted to laugh and she wanted to belt him, both at the same time. She couldn’t do either, not without giving away what he was up to.
Every couple of weeks, she and Isidor would walk over and see her folks. She enjoyed that more than she wanted to show. The Brucks talked about bakery business and neighborhood gossip and the music on the radio, and that was about it. At her own house, talk ranged all over the world and across thousands of years. She’d thought it would be the same for everybody-till she discovered it wasn’t.
Coming back to such talk felt wonderful. She said so once, while Isidor was using the toilet. Her father’s smile twisted a little. “The Brucks are nice people. They are-don’t get me wrong. But they’re not very curious, so they might not seem very exciting, either.”
“Not very curious!” she echoed, nodding. That was it, all right. That was exactly it. The Brucks knew what they knew, and they didn’t worry about anything else.
Socrates talked about people like that in the Apology. If she tried to tell Isidor so, he would look at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking ancient Greek herself. It wasn’t that knowing all the strange things she knew ever did her much practical good. But it gave her things to think about she wouldn’t have had otherwise. When she was with other people who had the same strange set of mental baggage, it also gave her things to talk about that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.
When she was with the Brucks… A flush from the bathroom said Isidor would be coming out. She put that one on the back burner.
Was this what marriage was about? Giving up part of yourself you hadn’t even been aware you had in exchange for love? She had no doubt that Isidor loved her. She loved him, too. It wasn’t that he made her abandon that part. But he didn’t have its match, so showing it to him seemed pointless.
But he had points of his own. As he sat down beside her, he said, “I heard this one from an Aryan the other day, if you can believe it. Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring are on a plane that crashes. Everybody aboard gets killed. Who is saved?”
Something in the way her father’s mouth twitched told her he already knew the joke. But all he said was, “ Nu? Who?” She was glad, because she hadn’t heard it, and she didn’t think her mother had, either.
“The German people,” Isidor answered, and exploded into laughter.
If there were microphones in the house, they were all in trouble. Sarah knew as much. She laughed anyway. So did Mother. “An Aryan told you that?” Father asked Isidor. He was also laughing, even as he went on, “Was he an SS man, seeing if he could land you in trouble because you thought it was funny?”
“No, no.” Isidor shook his head. “Not like that. It was one old guy talking to another one on the street. I heard it walking by.”
“Ach, so.” Samuel Goldman relaxed. “That should be all right, then. Nobody seems happy with the way things are going.”
“ ‘We continue the advance on the important Soviet citadel of Smolensk.’ ” Isidor amazed Sarah. She hadn’t dreamt he could imitate a self-important newsreader so well.
He surprised Sarah’s father, too. Samuel Goldman let out a sudden bray of laughter, then looked at Isidor as if he’d never really seen him before. Maybe he hadn’t. And maybe now he saw some little piece of what Sarah saw in the baker’s son.
Walking back to their little room after the visit, Isidor said, “I like talking with your mother and father. They’re… interesting.”
“Peculiar but fun?” Sarah’s voice was dry.
Isidor kicked a pebble down the sidewalk. “You said that. I didn’t.”
You sure meant it, though, Sarah thought. She cocked her head to one side-a gesture her father might have used-and asked, “Do you think I’m… interesting, too?”