They walked inside and punched their cards in the time clock. In spite of gabbing in the parking lot, they were on time. Jim stumped over to the big percolator in one corner and filled a waxed-cardboard cup with coffee. The java was still good now; it would be battery acid by the afternoon.
Still muttering and shaking his head, Jim went into the little cubicle he and Aaron shared while they were in the warehouse. The pinups and nudies decorating the walls were all his (which didn’t mean Aaron didn’t sometimes glance their way). He slammed the door behind him.
“What’s his problem?” Herschel Weissman asked Aaron.
“Believe it or not, he just found out I’m a Jew,” Aaron said.
His boss looked at him. Aaron knew what Weissman saw: the same very Jewish-looking mug that peered back from the bathroom mirror every morning. The older man raised an eyebrow. “Ripley wouldn’t believe that,” Weissman snorted, shaking his head.
“It’s true anyway. Now he has to figure out how much grief he’ll get from Goebbels and Himmler for working with me.” Not at all apropos of nothing, Aaron went on, “Did I ever tell you the guy we rent our house from has a number on his arm?”
“No. Well, at least he lived.” Weissman set a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “And you can’t expect a shlemiel not to be a shlemiel. It’d be a better world if you could, but you can’t, dammit.” Aaron nodded. He knew that, too, however much he wished he didn’t.
–
Whenever Vasili Yasevich went to sleep, he wondered if he’d wake up smelling smoke. Grigory Papanin and his hooligan friends didn’t seem to have the balls to challenge him openly. (That Vasili still carried Papanin’s pistol was bound to be another reason they didn’t want to mess with him when he could mess back.)
Asleep, though, he was vulnerable. He dossed in a long wooden building the people of Smidovich called a dormitory for single men not otherwise lodged. In Harbin, it would have been a flophouse. However you named it, it made even the shack he’d lived in after the Americans bombed Harbin seem a palace by comparison.
Compared to the Chinese, Russians were not a cleanly people. Vasili had seen that in nothing flat. Being more used to the Chinese way, he found Soviet grubbiness worse than someone accustomed to it would have. Living with other bachelors, some of them real refugees from Khabarovsk, didn’t help. Even young Chinese men with no women to keep them in line could be slobs. Young Russians…
Vasili wondered why the people who hired him to do their carpentry didn’t have him make a pigpen for the men who shared the dormitory. It smelled of unwashed Russians-who stank worse than Chinese-and stale food. The other bachelors left their junk wherever it happened to fall. The only two besides him who made up their cots were veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Nobody changed his bed linen. Vasili’s guess was, the dormitory had no spare sets.
People in the dormitory stole from one another whenever they saw the chance. They treated it as a game, something you did to amuse yourself or to make your life a little better. Vasili rapidly learned to keep everything that mattered to him in his pockets.
But if Papanin and his friends poured gasoline by the doors and windows and threw down three or four matches, what could he do? Cook was the first thing that occurred to him.
The second thing that occurred to him was Do unto others before they do unto you. If he roasted Grigory Papanin about medium-well, he wouldn’t have to worry about him any more. How hard would the militia work to find out who did it? They might put in some effort to pin a medal on the right guy, but that was about it.
All he wanted to do was go on about his business in Smidovich without having anybody pay much attention to him. Drawing notice was dangerous. If the government officials decided to investigate him, they’d find that nobody who really was from Khabarovsk had ever set eyes on him. Then…Then he’d find out why his father and mother thought swallowing poison was a better bet than letting the Chekists get hold of them.
In the meantime, he wandered through the village, looking for things other people would pay him to do. After he shored up a cabin’s sagging wall, the babushka who lived there said, “You did that faster than I thought you would, and it looks like a good job.”
“Thanks very much, Gospozha,” he answered, and bit his tongue a split second later. Ma’am was one of those un-Soviet words people weren’t supposed to use.
The old woman noticed, too. She wagged a blunt, work-roughened finger at him. “Where did you learn to talk, sonny?” she asked. “Not around here, that’s for sure. Around here it’s all mat and filth.” But she seemed more pleased than affronted. Unlike people Vasili’s age, when she was a girl Gospozha had been something you’d want to hear, not a slip that could land you in a gulag.
“I must have been raised by wolves,” Vasili said with a wry grin.
“Very polite wolves.” The babushka also grinned, showing off a mouthful of gold teeth. If she ever found herself in big trouble, she might bribe her way out of trouble by parting with them. She went on, “Heaven knows you’ve got better manners than that Papanin item. And you work harder than he ever did, not that that’s hard.”
“I’m just trying to get by, that’s all,” he replied. People here kept telling him how hard he worked. He’d never heard any such thing in Harbin. There, he’d felt like a man on a treadmill, running as hard as he could just to stay in one place. The Chinese had been desperately poor, but they’d all done everything they could to escape their poverty. If you didn’t do the same, you’d go under.
“You seem to be doing pretty well for yourself.” Her gray eyes, nested in a taiga of wrinkles, were disconcertingly shrewd. “And have you seen that Papanin lately?”
“Lately? No.” There, Vasili told the truth. The less he saw of the fellow who had been Smidovich’s handyman before he got here, the happier he was.
“You haven’t missed much-I’ll tell you that,” the babushka said. “He never was what you’d call pretty, but these days he looks like somebody threw him into a stone wall face-first. His snoot leans to one side and it’s flatter than a Chinaman’s, the Devil’s uncle grab me if I’m lying. And he walks like a truck ran over him.”
“Well, what do you know?” Vasili said. Did she think he’d brag about ruining Papanin? He wasn’t that dumb. He hoped he wasn’t, anyway.
“What do I know? I know what I’ve seen, or I wouldn’t’ve said anything about it.” She knew, all right, whether he bragged or not. What he’d done wasn’t a secret, however much he wished it would have been.
All the same, he gave back his most stolid, most Russian shrug. “I don’t care a kopek for Papanin. I’ll go my way, and he can go his.”
“His almost took him to the undertaker,” the old woman said. Vasili shrugged again. After a moment, so did she. She was twenty centimeters shorter than he was, but her shoulders might have been broader. “Khorosho. Those wolves who raised you must have known how to keep their mouths shut. Pretty smart wolves, hey? Don’t you go away, now.” She ducked back into the cabin for a moment.
When she came out, she was carrying two jars of pickled mushrooms. She handed them to Vasili. “Thanks very much,” he stammered, caught by surprise. “You already paid me, you know. You don’t have to do this.”
She waved his words aside. “Enjoy them. I picked them myself, and I put them in the jars. They’re good.” She stuck out her chin, daring him to make something of it.
He didn’t have the nerve. He knew he’d have to share them with the other guys at the dormitory, but that was all right. Without an icebox, they wouldn’t keep after he opened the jars. He tapped one with his thumbnail and said, “I’ll bring them back after they’re empty.”
“Thank you. Everything costs so much these days. I remember when…” She slowed to a stop and then laughed at herself. “That was years and years before you were born, so it wouldn’t matter to you.”