The people there took charge of Ihor as if he were a truck with a blown head gasket. He got the tetanus shot and a handful of pills that would have choked a mule. Under a doctor’s stern and watchful gaze, he swallowed them.
When they put him in a cot, he lay on his stomach. He figured his right side might also work; his back and left side wouldn’t. As the novocaine wore off, the wound and the stitches hurt more and more. They gave him aspirin, which did nothing much. He didn’t have the gall to ask for morphine, though. Some of the men in there with him had their bellies torn open. Others were missing arms or legs. They needed the strong drug worse than he did.
He got better food, and more food, in the ward than he had at the front. They wanted wounded men to recover as fast as they could, and fed them so they would. He hadn’t eaten so well back on the collective farm, either. No wonder he fell asleep right after supper.
Some time after midnight, the building shook as if in an earthquake. Horrid white light speared the wounded men’s eyes. They were well behind the line. All the same, Ihor feared the building would fall down on him. “God, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” he yipped. No one told him praying was antisocialist. Almost everyone in there who could talk at all prayed like a dying man-which most of them, like Ihor, had to think they were. The ward orderly called on the Trinity and the saints as readily as any of the injured men.
“Those atom things’ll cook us even back here!” cried a man who had a bloody bandage over the stump of his right arm. Ihor wanted to call him a stupid fool. He couldn’t very well, though, not when he was afraid the mutilated man might be right.
Only a moment later did he stop to think about the unit he’d left behind at the front. How many of them were still alive? Any at all?
In the last war, he would have been devastated, ravaged, had he been the sole survivor of his company. He supposed he still should be. And he still was, but only in an attenuated way. He hadn’t wanted to go back to war to begin with. The whole regiment was hastily thrown together. None of the other guys wanted to fight, either. It was only that all their other choices looked worse.
Two doctors came into the ward as soon as morning twilight gave them enough light to see by. They divided the patients in half. The more badly wounded ones, they loaded into ambulances and jeeps and sent east.
“What about the rest of us?” Ihor asked an orderly.
“You guys’ll be back on your pins in a few days,” the man answered. “Either you’ll be fighting again or the Americans’ll roll forward and take you prisoner and get you off our hands. And we’ll have Lord only knows how many more wounded coming in from the west.”
He was right, of course. The atom bomb killed whatever lay directly under it. If you were a little farther away, it melted you or burned you or blinded you or simply knocked heavy things or sharp things down onto you without immediately doing you in. Or the radiation made your hair fall out and left you bleeding from every orifice you had, and from your eyeballs and the beds of your nails. Or…
Ihor saw more in the way of horror till they turned him loose three days later than he had in all his service before that time. When they told him to get out of there so they could deal with more of the desperately wounded, he said, “I haven’t got a weapon.”
“Well, pick one up off the ground,” a doctor answered impatiently. “It’s not like there won’t be plenty to go around.”
Yes, they’d told raw troops almost the same thing in the early days of the Great Patriotic War. Ihor couldn’t very well doubt that the sawbones here was right. And, sure enough, that was how he got his AK-47 and plenty of ammo to fire from it. Whoever had owned the assault rifle didn’t need it any more.
The way he got it was why he wished he still carried the PPD instead. He joined what was more a band than a section. No American infantry pushed forward right where they were. They’d stayed alive. For the moment, that was plenty.
–
Near the barbed wire that separated the men’s and women’s sides of the camp stood a wooden arrangement something like a small gallows. From the gibbet hung not a man but a 105mm shell casing with a hole drilled in the side so a rope could go through. When a guard whacked it with a hammer, the horrible clatter did duty for a wakeup call.
It was 0530. Since summer still ruled, the sun had been up for a while, and Luisa Hozzel’s barracks had got light. That didn’t matter; she would have slept till noon had she got the chance. But a slap in the face and a boot in the backside had quickly taught her she had to pay attention to those crow’s-caw clanks. No matter how exhausted she was, they meant get moving.
She slid out of her bunk and put on her boots. She used them for a pillow and slept in the rest of her clothes. Then she staggered out onto the dirt courtyard in front of the barracks and took her place in one of the rows of ten. Guards-men with machine pistols-screamed curses at any female zek who didn’t move fast enough to suit them.
Luisa was picking up Russian faster than she’d dreamt she could. She had to. Nobody with any authority would condescend to speak German while giving orders, not after that dreadful first day. You’re here, was the guards’ attitude. You’ve got to figure out what we want. She’d learned zeks were prisoners-like her.
Some of the Russian women seemed as dejected and stunned as the newly arrived Germans. They were the politicals. Falling foul of Stalin’s henchmen here was as dangerous as irking the Nazis had been in Hitler’s time. The rest of the women prisoners were what the guards called “socially friendly elements.” They were ordinary criminals, in other words. They called themselves blatnye, which meant something like thieves or bitches.
They bossed the politicals around. They were used to this kind of life, where the women who’d thought of themselves as good Communists till the MGB grabbed them kept trying to believe it was all a ghastly mistake. The bitches bossed the foreigners around, too. Some of them were bull dykes, and as predatory as any man. Luisa didn’t mind being bossed-they knew the ropes and she didn’t. The other…She counted herself lucky no one had put a serious move on her yet.
When all the zeks were in place, the guards went up and down, making sure each row held ten women and counting the rows. That kind of arithmetic, even a camp guard could do. The Reds might not believe in God, but the count was sacred. Till the morning count came out right, nobody got breakfast. Till the evening count was right, no one ate supper or went into the barracks. At this season, that wasn’t too bad. In winter, standing there in, say, half a meter of snow…
At last, after literally counting on their fingers to make sure they had everything straight, the guards decided no one had somehow escaped the camp for the dubious shelter of the pine forest that ran on for untold hundreds or thousands of kilometers in every direction. The top sergeant pointed toward the dining hall and yelled something that meant either Go! or Eat!-Luisa hadn’t worked out which yet.
She went and she ate. Rations had been small and rotten-often literally-at the end of the war. They hadn’t got better for a long time afterwards. Then, when they did, the Russians overran Fulda, and times turned tough all over again. Nothing, though, nothing had prepared her for what she got in the gulag.
She hadn’t been to Dachau or Buchenwald, let alone Treblinka or Auschwitz. Maybe people there had got this kind of horrible slop. If they had, all the atrocity stories the Allies told were true. She didn’t know how you were supposed to live. All she could do was try.