“Don’t worry about it,” Vasili told him. “You need the cash worse than I do. Buy yourself something good to eat or some nice vodka.”
“I’m cheating you,” Berman said fretfully. “That’s not why I asked you to stop by. I heard you bought and sold things and didn’t steal too much, and so….”
“And so,” Vasili agreed. “I’m not stealing from you, either, and you aren’t cheating me. Go on, take the cabbage, for God’s sake!” He wished he could tell Berman to spend some on a pretty girl who’d make him forget his troubles for a little while. But he could tell the old man wouldn’t listen to him if he did.
He put the opium in the pocket from which he’d taken the money. Little by little, he was adding apothecary to carpenter and bricklayer and odd-job man. As David Berman knew, poppy juice was good for more than keeping addicts happy. It cut pain where nothing else would: a blessing in this world if ever there was one.
It occurred to Vasili that Marx hadn’t been joking when he called religion the opiate of the masses. Like opium, religion gave solace and took pain away. And not everybody could afford opium.
Wind bit his nose as soon as he stepped outside. His valenki sank into the soft, newly fallen snow. Walking was awkward, almost as if he were slogging through mud.
Slog he did, as did the others who lived in Smidovich. A few of them had snowshoes, and moved awkwardly in a different way. Everyone seemed resigned to the weather. It wasn’t as if people came to Siberia from the Riviera. If they weren’t born here, then, like Vasili, they already knew all they needed to know about hard winters. He lowered his head and turned away from the wind. It didn’t help much, but it might have done a little.
A woman came by with a wool scarf wrapped around her face so only her eyes showed. That was a good idea. Vasili had a wool scarf-who didn’t? He’d have to try her trick himself.
And there was Grigory Papanin. His smashed nose left him instantly recognizable. He moved with hunched-over care; he still wasn’t back to the swaggering cock-o’-the-walk he’d been before he made the mistake of messing with Vasili.
In the snowy cold, with everyone bundled up, he didn’t see that he was nearing his nemesis till they almost bumped into each other. His eyes widened a little. If that wasn’t from fear, Vasili had never seen it. Papanin owned some new reasons to fear him, as a matter of fact.
“Don’t just clump on by, smegma-lips,” Vasili said. “I need to talk to you.”
Papanin’s eyes went wide again. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he mumbled.
“I bet you don’t,” Vasili said. “Who tried to sell me to the Chekists? Was that a piece of shit who smelled like you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Fuck your mother in the mouth if you don’t. They told me it was you.”
That brought Papanin up short. “They…told you?” he said, something not far from existential despair in his voice.
“Sure they did. Why wouldn’t they?” Vasili realized he’d struck a nerve. Like a dentist doing a root canal, he probed deeper: “You never did figure out what you were screwing with, did you? You aren’t just ugly. You’re stupid to go with it. If I have to have anything to do with you again, bet your balls it’s the last time you’ll be sorry.”
“I didn’t know you were-” Papanin broke off. He couldn’t make himself come out with it.
“I never said I was.” Vasili made sure he said that. He might imply he belonged to the MGB, but if he just went and claimed it they’d land on him with hobnailed jackboots as soon as they found out. “But do you want to have another go like the last one? We can take care of that right now.”
A younger, more innocent Papanin would have sailed into a fight without a thought in his thick head. A man who’d already taken one bad beating, though, wasn’t so anxious to risk another. Papanin seemed to shrink into himself. “Just leave me the fuck alone, why don’t you?” he whined.
“This time, cunt. Not the next.” Vasili went on his way. He didn’t look back. Had Papanin had the nerve, he could have jumped him. Vasili had got him that way.
All he did was mooch off through the blowing snow. He knew he was facing a beast meaner than himself. Vasili hadn’t thought of himself that way in China. There, he’d been an ordinary fellow getting along as best he could. He’d looked funny, but he’d known how things worked.
Here in Smidovich, he looked ordinary. But he still felt much more out of place than he ever had in Harbin. If he worked hard, these people suspected him. How was anybody supposed to guess that might happen? Why would anybody sneer at someone who tried to get ahead?
For a moment, he thought the question had no possible answer. Then he realized that, in Soviet terms, it did. Working hard for your own benefit was un-Communistic. Stalin and his henchmen wanted people to work hard for the state, to be what they called Stakhanovites and shock workers. The state and the state alone deserved such slavish devotion…or so you thought if you were Stalin or one of his henchmen.
Peasants who worked hard for themselves and didn’t want to give up to the state what they produced were called kulaks. Stalin had liquidated them when Vasili was still a kid. Reports leaked out of the USSR and into northern China. A few refugees got out. Their tales didn’t shrink in the telling.
And was the Soviet Union better off for the way it operated? Looking around Smidovich, Vasili had a hard time seeing how.
17
The more Cade Curtis saw of Captain Pak Ho-san, the less he liked him. True, the ROK officer wasn’t a bugout artist. Since too many of his countrymen were, that counted for something. In every other way, though, Pak made Cade wonder why the United States wanted anything to do with a country that produced the likes of him.
He vented his spleen with Howard Sturgis. “It’s the Lord’s own miracle one of those Korean privates doesn’t toss a grenade onto his sleeping bag. What happens to those sorry SOBs is a shame and a disgrace. The sergeants beat on ’em like drums, and old Pak, he just watches and smiles. What kind of noncoms are those? What kind of officer is he?”
“Japanese,” Lieutenant Sturgis said. “Remember, I told you that the day the ROK, uh, guys”-he didn’t quite say gooks-“came into the line.”
“Shit, that’s right,” Cade said. “You did.”
“Uh-huh.” Sturgis nodded. “Remember, the Japs ran the show here for forty years. Assholes like Pak, when they saw soldiers, what kind of soldiers did they see? They saw the fuckin’ Japs. And the way the Japs treated their enlisted men, if I did that to a dog, the SPCA’d take him away from me.”
“Yeah,” Cade said thoughtfully, and then, “I didn’t know they let Koreans be real soldiers.”
“That’s right-labor gangs were pretty much it,” Sturgis said. “I don’t think there were any Korean officers, just noncoms. But we were an English colony, and our army still does a lot of things the way England did. Korea was a Japanese colony. Who were the Koreans gonna copy?”
That made more sense than anything Cade had thought of on his own. All the same, he said, “We don’t do that kind of crap, and we beat the hell out of the Japs. Next time I see Pak or anybody under him knocking some poor damned draftee around, I’m not gonna put up with it.”
“You’ll piss off the brass if you mess with our allies,” Sturgis warned.
Cade threw back his head and guffawed. “What’s the worst thing they can do to me? They can put me in the line in Korea! I’m already in the line in goddamn Korea. Why should I worry?”
“They can bust your ass down to private if they feel like it.”
“Big deal. I’d be a private in the line in Korea.”
“Okay, sir.” By Howard Sturgis’ tone of voice, it wasn’t. Sure enough, he added, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Once Cade made up his mind and decided to do something about the way Captain Pak and the men he led treated the ordinary South Korean soldiers, he figured he wouldn’t have long to wait before they gave him a gold-plated chance. He wasn’t wrong, either. The very next day, Pak Ho-san screamed at a private for having mud on his uniform. The whole trench was muddy. When it wasn’t, that was because the mud had frozen or was covered in snow. Cade didn’t speak Korean, but the way the captain kept jabbing at the spot on the poor private’s tunic with his index finger left him in no doubt about what was going on. Then Pak smacked the private across the face, hard enough to draw blood at the corner of his mouth.