“They used to keep Russians here, too,” Medgyessy said. “They had to put them in a camp of their own. Too many fracases with everybody else.”
“Fraternal socialist allies united against the capitalist world,” Istvan said dryly.
“That’s right. They aren’t far away, though. And the International Red Cross has officially notified the Soviet Union that the two camps are very close.” The colonel paused expectantly.
Back before Istvan was conscripted, his trig teacher had had a mannerism like that when he was waiting to see whether the class got it. And, like a flash of lightning, Istvan did: “If we’re close to the Russians, they won’t drop an atom bomb around here!”
Bela Medgyessy eyed him with the same fond contempt he’d known from Sergeant Gergely. It was as close as Magyars of a certain stripe could come to liking people like him. “You are a smart Jewboy,” the officer murmured.
What did he expect? All over Eastern Europe, stupid Jews had been weeded out for centuries. Darwin could have used them to illustrate natural selection. Medgyessy was waiting. Istvan managed to murmur, “Thanks-uh, sir.”
The colonel took the deference as if he were an old-time aristocrat, too. “Go on and find yourself a bunk. Chow call pretty soon. The food’s shitty, but there’s plenty of it.”
Istvan found a bunk. The mattress was thicker and the blanket warmer and softer than the ones he’d used in basic training. But as soon as he looked at the blond guy across from him, he knew he’d found the wrong bunk. The Magyar was in his late twenties, with a scar on one cheek. He had an Arrow Cross tattooed on the back of his right hand and a Turul, a legendary bird of prey also beloved of Hungarian Fascists, on the back of his left. The Hungarian People’s Army had issued him a rifle anyway, probably because the recruiters knew an attack dog when they saw one.
He was looking at Istvan, too. He didn’t need long to add up what he saw. “Are you what I think you are?” he growled.
“Me? No, I’m a plate of stuffed cabbage,” Istvan answered. In the middle of the sentence, he threw himself at the tough guy. This fight was going to happen. He’d had plenty of brawls like this before. Better to get it over with now, and to enjoy the advantage of a tiny bit of surprise.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t stylish. The bastard with the Fascist tattoos was no coward. During the fight for Budapest, Istvan had seen that being a Fascist son of a bitch and being brave had nothing to do with each other. For that matter, there were plenty of Communist sons of bitches, too, and not all of them were cowards, either.
Pretty soon, Istvan couldn’t see out of his left eye. He tried to gouge out the Arrow Cross man’s right eye. The guy jerked his head away and did his best to bite off Istvan’s thumb. It was that kind of fight.
Fittingly for that kind of fight, it ended when Istvan brought up his knee, as hard as he could, into the blond guy’s crotch. The Fascist let out a shriek and folded up like a concertina. Istvan gave him a right and a left that made his nose lean to one side and fountain blood.
Then, painfully, he climbed to his feet. He booted the Arrow Cross POW in the ribs. “Well, you stinking sack of shit, am I what you think I am?” he choked out. His cut tongue found a broken front tooth. For that, he kicked the Magyar again.
Like him, the man with the tattoos could see out of only one eye. He peered blearily up at Istvan. “You’re a kike, all right,” he said in a thick voice-his mouth had taken damage, too. “But you’re sure as hell one motherfucking tough kike.”
Istvan glanced at the other Hungarian prisoners, who’d gathered to watch the free entertainment. Battered as he was, any one of them could have knocked him to pieces without breathing hard. If they mobbed him, he was dead.
One of them, a lance-corporal, nodded to him. “Miklos is right-you are a tough Jew,” the man said. “He should’ve found out sooner.”
“Does everybody get this kind of hello?” Istvan asked. He spat blood on the floor near Miklos, but not on him. The Arrow Cross man wasn’t close to trying to stand yet.
The lance-corporal shrugged. “Some people do, some people don’t. Miklos must’ve thought he needed to see if you could take care of yourself. Well, you gave him the old horse’s cock up the ass.”
A thousand years after the Magyars had settled in Hungary, their curses still showed that their ancestors once roamed the steppe as mounted warriors. My ancestors roamed the desert even longer ago, Istvan thought. He didn’t know any Hebrew curses, though. He hardly knew any Hebrew at all. His family had been secular, not that the Nazis and their Arrow Cross stooges gave a damn.
When he went to the kitchen to get lunch, he wondered whether the guards-he thought they were French, though they wore mostly U.S.-style gear-would notice his battered face. If they did, they didn’t care. They ignored Miklos, too, and he was even more banged up. Their attitude was, whatever the POWs did to each other was their own business as long as it didn’t involve firearms.
With his broken tooth and a wounded tongue, chewing hurt. The food came from American ration packs. Colonel Medgyessy had it right: none of it was anything a Hungarian really wanted to eat. But it did fill you up. Istvan had been hungry all the time as a conscript in training. He’d guessed a prisoner of war would have it even worse. Evidently not. The USA was so rich, it fed POWs better than his country fed its soldiers. How did the Hungarian People’s Republic-or Russia, for that matter-hope to win against such wealth and production?
–
Vasili Yasevich looked at the old Jew. “Yes, that’s opium, all right.” It was more than a hundred grams of opium, in fact. “Are you sure you want to get rid of it, David Samuelovich?” He couldn’t imagine anyone who used opium wanting to sell any. If you sold it, you couldn’t smoke it or eat it yourself.
But David Samuelovich Berman nodded. “I have no use for it,” he answered. “I bought it for Natasha when she was sick and in a lot of pain. It eased her better than anything else I could give her. But now she’s gone, so”-he spread his mittened hands-“I’ll get rid of what’s left.”
“I’m sorry,” Vasili said. He wore mittens, too, and a padded jacket and trousers, and a rabbit-fur cap with the earflaps down. Their breath smoked. It was almost as cold inside Berman’s little log hut as it was outside. It also looked as if he hadn’t cleaned in there for a long time. With Natasha-who must have been his wife-dead, he must have stopped caring about himself, too.
“So am I. She was…” Berman paused to think. “She was everything, is what she was.” After a moment, he seemed to recall why Vasili was there. “So what will you give me for the drug?”
“Two rubles a gram?” Vasili said tentatively. He still wasn’t sure about prices here. In Harbin, he would have known just what to pay, only he would have been afraid to pay it. Opium was illegal in Smidovich, too, but they wouldn’t shoot you for having some. This kind of chance, he was willing to take.
David Berman eyed him in surprise. At first, Vasili thought he’d been too low. He knew he could come up. But then the skinny man with the scraggly white beard murmured, “That’s more than I paid for it.”
“You’ll never make a haggler,” Vasili said.
“Shows what you know, pup,” the Jew replied. “But this, this I just want to get rid of. It reminds me of the bad times. So two rubles a gram is fine. I might have given it to you for nothing if you’d sung me a sad song.”
“Believe me, you don’t want to hear me sing.” Vasili had the small satisfaction of making David Berman smile. He took three hundred-ruble notes from his jacket pocket. Each bore Lenin’s fierce, scowling face on one side and the onion domes of the A-bombed Kremlin on the other.
“It’s too much. I’ll give you fifty back.” Berman started to dig into his own pocket.