Most of the time, but not always. The sergeant did his best impersonation of a poisonous snake. He hissed angrily. His beady little eyes didn’t even blink. “I’ve got my eye on you,” he said yet again. “You hear what I’m telling you?”
“Oh, yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor said after a deliberate puff. “I hear you real good.”
“Then act like it, you worthless fucker,” Prishvin said. “I know your kind. You were the traitors who went out and said hello to the Nazis with bread and salt.”
Some Ukrainians had done that when the Germans invaded in 1941. There had been a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, though more of its men came from Poland than from the Soviet Union. Glancing at Prishvin out of the corner of his eye, Ihor could see why so many of his people had thought Hitler a better bet than Stalin. Hitler hadn’t starved millions of Ukrainians to death.
He hadn’t yet. But he started in as soon as he got the chance. Ihor said, “Comrade Sergeant, I fought the Fascists in the partisans and then in the Red Army. I was wounded in the service of the Soviet Union.”
“Da, da, da,” Prishvin said, by which he meant Nyet, nyet, nyet. “All you cocksuckers who can’t say G talk about what heroes you were. It’s all bullshit, too.”
“Would you like to see my scar?” Ihor asked, making as if to unroll his puttees and hike up his trouser leg.
“I don’t give a shit about your scar, on account of it won’t tell me whose gun gave it to you,” the sergeant said. “And you were screwing around in front of our lines just now. For all I know, you were screwing around with the Americans. If I could prove it, I’d shoot you myself. I know how to shoot my own dog.”
Any son of a bitch would, Ihor thought. He didn’t come out with it. He had no interest in cutting his own throat. All he wanted to do was get through the war in one piece and make it back to Anya at the collective farm outside of smashed Kiev.
It was funny. He’d been eager to fight the Hitlerites. He’d seen what they’d done to the Ukraine. They’d treated it even worse than Stalin had, and that wasn’t easy. But the Americans? As far as he knew, there were no Americans within a thousand kilometers of the Ukraine. Yes, they’d bombed it. But Stalin had also bombed America.
Rain started coming down on the field somewhere west of Paderborn. Sergeant Prishvin sent Ihor one more glare, then ambled off to spread joy and good tidings to some of the other soldiers in his charge. Ihor pulled his shelter half out of his pack and stuck his head through the slit. It was an old one, hauled from a storehouse where it had sat since the Great Patriotic War. The rubberized fabric had cracks and bald spots. It still did a better job of keeping the water off him than anything else would have.
He got a cigarette going, leaning forward so the brim of his helmet shielded the coal from the rain. Another man-a blackass from the Caucasus-also decked out in a rain cape spoke to him in halting Russian: “What you do to make sergeant love you so big, uh, so much?”
“I don’t know, Aram.” Ihor shrugged. “He likes my face, I guess. Or maybe I’m just lucky.”
“Ha! Some luck!” Aram Demirchyan snorted. Then he asked, “You got more smokes?”
“Sure.” Ihor gave him one. He’d taken the pack off a dead German civilian. One thing about the Red Army hadn’t changed a bit since the last war: the higher-ups expected you to do your own scrounging. They’d give you ammo, vodka, and a little food. For everything else, you were on your own.
“Spasibo.” Demirchyan’s stubbly cheeks hollowed as he took a drag. Some of the stubble was gray; he had to be four or five years older than Ihor. He’d also been through the mill the last time around. After blowing out a gray stream, he muttered, “Something should ought to happening to that cunt.”
“Who knows? Maybe something will,” Ihor answered. Noncoms and company-grade officers who made their men hate them sometimes had accidents. All the men who served under them said they were accidents, anyhow. Other people sometimes wondered, but war was war. Even good people wound up hurt or dead when they came to the front. Even good people occasionally caught a bullet or a grenade fragment from their own side, too. If that happened to the fuckers a little more often, well, proving such things wasn’t easy.
Demirchyan did some more muttering, this time in his own throaty language. Ihor thought he heard Sergeant Prishvin’s name in there. He didn’t think the Armenian was reciting love poetry.
“He give you a hard time, too?” Ihor asked.
Aram Demirchyan’s big, heavy-featured head bobbed up and down. “He give everybody hards times,” he said. “Even Russians. Russians don’t act Russian enough to happy him.”
A machine gun stuttered out a burst, a few hundred meters to the south. That was a Red Army Maxim. Ihor knew the sound as well as he knew that of his own voice. He was still getting used to the reports and deadly rhythms of the Yankees’ automatic weapons.
But the machine gun that replied wasn’t American at all. The rounds came back one after another, so close together that the shots merged into a single, horrible ripping roar.
“Ah, fuck ’em!” he exclaimed. “They’ve yanked one of Hitler’s saws out of storage.”
“MG-42 scare shit out of I,” Demirchyan said matter-of-factly.
“They scare the shit out of everybody on the wrong end of them,” Ihor said. The German machine gun with the ridiculous rate of fire and the quick-change barrel was still the finest piece of its kind, and kilometers ahead of whatever ran second. It had turned Wehrmacht squads into machine-gun crews and a few other guys to protect them with rifles and Schmeissers.
The Nazis made a fair number of weapons that were better than anything their foes used. In the end, they didn’t make enough of them, or have enough bastards in Feldgrau to use them. A T-34/85 might not be so fine a tank as a Panther, but when there were six or eight or ten Soviet machines for every German one….
In that case, you waited five or six years and then you fought another war.
“Listen to me! Listen hard, you drippy pricks!” Sergeant Prishvin yelled. “We’re going forward! We’re going to push back the men north of that fucking Nazi gun, we’re going to fire on it from a flanking position, and we’re going to put it out of action or make it retreat. Forward! Za rodina!”
Whether it was for the motherland or not, Ihor didn’t want to go forward. The machine gun might get him. Other enemy weapons might, too. Of course, the MGB would give him a bullet in the nape of the neck if he hung back. Out of his hole he came, chambering a round in his Kalashnikov.
The Red Army men moved by groups and rushes, each attack party covering the other’s advance. They’d learned from the Great Patriotic War’s suicidal charges. The ones who lived had, anyhow.
Anatoly Prishvin was a dickhead, but a brave dickhead. He led from the front, cursing his section on. Somebody in an American helmet popped up and aimed a rifle at him. Ihor shot the enemy soldier before he realized what he was doing.
“Wasting of good bullets,” Aram Demirchyan said when they flopped down behind a fallen chimney.
“I know,” Ihor agreed mournfully. To his surprise, they did make the machine-gun crew fall back. Prishvin didn’t thank him for dropping the American. That suited Ihor. The less he had to do with the sergeant, the better.
–
“Bedtime, Leon,” Aaron Finch said.
“No,” Leon told him. He wasn’t saying that because he said no all the time. He was getting over that. He was saying it because he didn’t want to go to bed. Uncle Marvin and Aunt Sarah and Cousin Olivia were over, which made the living room even more interesting than usual.
“Bedtime,” Aaron repeated, a little more firmly this time, so Leon could see he wasn’t kidding.