The stew the cook ladled into her bowl was so watery, it barely deserved the name. Bits of chopped cabbage and turnip or potato or parsnip or some other root gave most of what bulk it had. It was also vaguely briny; at some point or another, a salted herring or sardine must have swum past the cauldron it came out of.
Her parents, who’d lived through the Turnip Winter and the sawdust-stretched war bread of the Kaiser’s time, would have turned up their noses at the black, badly baked brick she got with her stew. It was full of husks, and what grain there was was rye and oats.
In Fulda, she’d drunk coffee white with milk at breakfast. The wartime ersatz had been bad, but it beat the devil out of the weak tea the Russians grudgingly gave the zeks. They didn’t even waste sugar on prisoners. The stuff’s sole virtue was, it was hot.
No matter how bad the food was, she wolfed it. Partly, that was because she was hungry all the time. And they gave you only fifteen minutes to eat. Whatever you couldn’t down in that time, you lost.
After breakfast…latrine call. Luisa had used some odorous outhouses in Germany, but nothing like these slit trenches. Everyone took care of her business-piss, shit, period, whatever-in front of everyone else. The setup was designed to humiliate. You tried not to breathe. You tried not to look. But Hercules, even if he’d cleaned out the Augean Stables, would have thrown up his hands and run away if he saw-and got a whiff of-this.
Then the women separated into work gangs and went out into those endless woods to fell trees. The Soviet Union proudly proclaimed equality between the sexes. It lived up to its claims by making the work norm for a gang of women the same as that for a gang of men. Guards cursed at zeks to keep them working. If that didn’t work, they clouted them with the butts of their machine pistols.
Luisa and Trudl Bachman inexpertly used a two-person saw almost as tall as they were. This was what you got for having husbands who’d gone off to fight the Russians. Neither of them had any idea whether their man was alive or dead. They were both paying the price either way.
Back and forth, back and forth. Beavers as inept as they were would never have toppled enough trees to build a dam. Luisa’s shoulders had the toothache. Sharper pain came from her hands. The blisters on her palms popped and bled, over and over. Some of the women who’d been here for years had calluses that let them stub out smokes without feeling a thing. Those were ugly, but Luisa craved them just the same.
Up in a pine tree no one was attacking, a jay called. Luisa could see it if she looked up. But it didn’t sound like the jays back in Germany. It spoke a different dialect, the way a woman from Munich and one from up near the Dutch border would have.
When she looked up once too often, a guard yelled, “Bistro!” He wasn’t looking for a French restaurant with a zinc bar. That was how you said Hurry up! in Russian.
After a while-it only seemed forever-the pine crashed to the ground. The jay flew off, screeching in fear. Luisa and Trudl traded the saw for two hatchets. They used them to trim the branches from the trunk. Bending to do that made Luisa ache in different ways in different places.
They put in twelve hours like that before the guards paraded them back to the camp. Luisa shambled along like a dead thing. They lined up for the evening count. As usual, the screws needed to try more than once before they were happy. Supper was breakfast over again.
Tomorrow would be the same as today. She had no idea how long they meant to keep her here. Till she was dead? Till Stalin was dead? Till the A-bombs made sure everybody was dead?
For now, she was too weary to care. After evening latrine call, she clambered into her bunk, took off her boots, and laid them under her head. When you got tired enough, any pillow felt great. She was tired enough and then some. She closed her eyes. She vanished.
–
Cade Curtis wore a clean uniform. His cheeks were freshly shaved. His hair was GI short, and smelled pleasantly of Vitalis. Except for the PPSh he carried, he might have been ready to appear in a Stateside review. It was nighttime, and blacked-out nighttime at that, so no one could get a good look at him, but he knew.
He clucked sadly as he slid into the jeep. “After you’ve spent a while in Pusan, you don’t want to go back to the front,” he said.
The corporal behind the wheel chuckled. “Sir, if I had a buck for every guy who told me that, I’d be rich like Rockefeller. A quarter, even.”
“I believe you,” Cade said. Pusan was almost as American as apple pie. When you got leave, you could go there to clean up. Cade had. You could eat American food that didn’t come out of ration cans. Cade had. You could get crocked out of your skull. Cade had. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but nobody’d asked him about that, so he hadn’t had to tell any lies.
And you could indulge in other pleasures. Korean women had quickly discovered that American men had more money than they knew what to do with. You didn’t have to look very hard or very far to find joyhouses. Cade had. Buying his fun faintly embarrassed him. Buying it was better than going without, though. He’d been careful to use his pro kit right away every time.
The corporal started the jeep and put it in gear. Away it rolled, reliable as jeeps always were. It didn’t roll very fast, though. Driving through darkness without headlights was suicidal if you hurried.
Driving through darkness in Korea with headlights was also suicidal. “Here’s hoping Bedcheck Charlie takes the night off,” Cade said.
“Amen to that!” the driver agreed. The Red Chinese and North Koreans flew night-harassment missions in ancient Russian wood-and-cloth-and-wire biplane trainers. They were slow and underpowered even by World War I standards. But they carried a machine gun and little bombs a pilot could lob from the cockpit as if all the years after 1915 had been canceled. They were damn nuisances, and they could kill you just as dead as more modern toys.
White-painted posts by the side of the road gave faint clues about where you were about to go off it. Nearer the front, North Korean infiltrators knocked them down or lied with them to lead traffic off the road and sometimes into an ambush. This close to the big American base on the southern coast, though, they were probably reliable.
Of course, the highway itself was in bad shape. The flimsy paving hadn’t been made to support all the tanks and trucks and halftracks that used it. It also hadn’t been made to get shelled. The potholes were of the tooth-rattling, kidney-crunching variety.
“Boy, this is a fun ride,” Cade said after a jounce made him bite his tongue. “How much do I have to pay to get off?”
“Sir, you got to take that up with Uncle Sam, not with me,” the corporal said. They both laughed, for all the world as if it were funny.
They’d come ten or fifteen miles northwest when the formidable antiaircraft batteries around Pusan all started banging away at once. Cade peered back over his shoulder at the red and orange and yellow tracers scribing lines across the southern sky and the shells bursting in air.
“Looks like the Fourth of July there,” he said.
“It does, yeah.” The driver nodded. “I can see a skosh in my rear-view mirror. You don’t mind, I ain’t gonna turn around like you done.” Like a lot of men in the Far East, the corporal used the Japanese for a little bit without even noticing it wasn’t English.
And then Cade stopped caring about Japanese slang or any other kind, for a new sun blazed in the sky above Pusan. He crossed himself and whispered a Hail Mary before he even thought about it. Beside him, in the driver’s seat, the corporal moved his lips in prayer, too.
Then the two-striper asked, “Sir, are we too far away for that fucker to, like, fry us?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Cade answered slowly. “I think we are, but I sure wouldn’t swear to it or anything.”