That was fine for the short term. But as the short term grew longer, then what? How did you unfry and unscramble the egg? How did you get civilian government going again? How did you persuade the military to let go of the reins?
Those were all interesting questions. Marian had answers to none of them. “I’ll just have to see what it’s like and how things work out, that’s all,” she said.
Pretty soon, the bottle was empty. Marian’s head spun; she was glad she wasn’t leaving till tomorrow morning. Welcome to freedom! You’re under arrest for driving drunk! That wouldn’t be the way to celebrate getting away from the refugee camp, would it?
She’d drunk less than any of the men, too. Yitzkhak lit a cigarette. With all the potent booze he’d put down, she marveled he didn’t burst into flames. “So long. Good luck,” he said, and ambled away. It was also a wonder he didn’t stagger or fall, but he didn’t.
Neither did Moishe. “Keep your eyes open. Americans, they trust too much,” he said. That struck her as making good sense. Whether it would when she was sober…she’d see. Moishe also went off, under his own power and steady enough for all practical purposes.
That left Fayvl. He fiddled with the skin at the end of a fingernail. “You take care of yourself and your little girl, your oytser, here,” he said.
“I will,” Marian answered quietly. “I’ll do my best, anyway.”
“All you can do is all you can do. I tell myself that a lot. Sometimes almost I believe it for a little while.” Tabakman’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. He shook himself like a retriever coming out of a cold lake. “You need anything, you have any kind trouble, you get hold of me, hear? I help you any way I can, promise.”
“Thank you.” Marian didn’t know what he could do. Maybe he didn’t know himself. She did believe he would try.
“Well, I should ought to go.” He touched a finger to his cloth cap, first at her, then at Linda. After that, he heaved himself to his feet. Like his friends, he moved better than he had any business doing. He looked back once, but only for a second.
“He’s a funny man,” Linda said.
“Is he?” To Marian, Fayvl Tabakman was about the least funny man she’d ever met. “Why do you think so?”
“Because he’s sad all the time, only he doesn’t want anybody to know,” Linda answered.
Marian gaped at her daughter. Out of the mouths of babes, she thought. She couldn’t have summed up Fayvl any better in one sentence herself if she’d tried for a week.
The next morning, she and Linda set out, going up the gravel road down which trucks brought supplies into Camp Nowhere. The camp had sprung up in what was a meadow. It was where people in Everett had clumped together after the Russian bomb went off.
Eventually, the gravel road ran into a real paved one. After a while, she came to Snohomish. It also showed damage from the bomb. She kept on driving south, sticking to roads that stayed well inland. If she veered back to the coast, she’d end up in Seattle, and Seattle was the last place she wanted to be.
She and Linda stopped for lunch at a roadside diner. She ordered a BLT. Linda had a kid’s hamburger and French fries. “This is yummy!” she said. And so it was. Ordinary food in an ordinary place seemed wonderful when you’d got used to the slop they served up at the refugee camp. Marian did have to remind herself to pay before she left. She hadn’t needed to think about that for a while. But you got what you paid for, sure as hell.
–
“This is Moscow speaking.” The voice came out of a speaker mounted on a wooden pole in front of the government building in what passed for Smidovich’s town square. Vasili Yasevich and a few other people paused to listen to the news.
“Moo!” one of the men said. Everybody who heard him chuckled. This broadcaster’s southern accent did make him sound something like a cow. From things Vasili had heard, Radio Moscow no longer originated in the city it claimed as its own. And the newsreader had replaced another man who’d sat in that seat for a long time.
If you were a Russian, you already knew that-knew it and took it for granted. No, you did if you were a Soviet citizen. Vasili was as Russian as anybody in Smidovich-more Russian than the Jews and slant-eyed natives who shared the place with people like him. But he was having to learn how to be Soviet as he went along.
“In its valiant assistance to the forces of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army continues to storm forward against the American imperialists and their lackeys in Korea,” the newsreader said. “Backing up its allies, the Soviet Long-Range Bomber Force, part of the ever-victorious Red Air Force, had previously punished the reactionary running dogs with doses of atomic fire.”
“Good. That’s very good,” the fellow beside Vasili muttered, to himself but intending to be heard by others. Vasili was used to news with a lot of propaganda stirred in-both the Japanese who ran Manchukuo and the Red Chinese who took over from them had seasoned the stew that way. But Stalin’s workers’ paradise used more than even he could stomach.
After two coughs, Roman Amfiteatrov murmured, “Please excuse me.” Then he went back to the news: “In Western Europe, progressive forces headed by that vanguard of proletarian triumph, the glorious Red Army, continue to regroup after the vicious and cruel onslaught staged by Truman’s clique of rabid capitalist hyenas. The advance is expected to resume in short order.”
When Stalin dropped A-bombs on Korea, that was patriotic and heroic. When Truman dropped them on Germany, that was vicious and cruel. Vasili was cynical enough to doubt that the American radio reporters saw things the same way. He did wonder how many of these Soviet citizens doubted as he did.
He wondered that for a little while, anyhow. Then he saw Grigory Papanin strutting along without a care in the world-and without any of his tough-guy henchmen. Vasili forgot about the mooing voice coming out of the speaker. As unobtrusively as he could, he followed Papanin. If the son of a bitch thought he could tell Vasili how to work, pretty soon he’d decide he could horn in on the money Vasili made, too.
Sure as the devil, Papanin figured he was the biggest turd in this little town. He might have been, till Vasili got here. Now he’d find out he wasn’t any more. Or I’ll find out I’m in over my head, Vasili thought. With a shrug, he pushed that aside. Such doubts, unlike the ones about newsreaders, did you no good.
Papanin didn’t even look behind him as he took his one-man parade down a dirt street. He thought such arrogance was his by right. Vasili thought he was a jerk.
He gained ground on the bigger man as fast as he could while staying quiet. His right hand went into his jacket pocket-not for the straight razor, but for a knuckleduster he’d got from a white-bearded Jew as part payment when he put a new floor in the old man’s house.
He tapped Grigory Papanin on the right shoulder from behind with his left hand. “Huh?” Papanin said as he turned to see who dared bother him. His face changed when he recognized Vasili. “You-” he began.
“Yeah, me, dickface,” Vasili said, and hit him in the nose, as hard as he could, with the brass knuckles. Cartilage mashed under metal. Blood squirted. Grigory Papanin squealed like a bull calf when it was suddenly made into a steer. His hands flew to the wounded part.
Vasili did his best to turn Papanin into a steer, all right. His booted foot caught the other man square in the crotch. Papanin squealed again, on a higher note this time, and folded up like a concertina.
Another kick, this time in the pit of Papanin’s stomach. Had Vasili had such footwork all the time, he might have played forward for ChSKA Moscow or Dinamo Kiev. Papanin sagged down to the dusty street.
Nobody sprinted out of the shops and cabins to either side, screaming for Vasili to stop beating up that poor man. Nobody yelled for the militia to come arrest him. That silence told him everything he needed to know about how popular Grigory Papanin was in Smidovich.