He supposed even Americans could see it might be better to arrange an untimely demise for a captain before the bastard got his whole company killed.
Eventually, Prishvin went off to make the other men in the section love him even more than they already did. Aram Demirchyan ambled over to where Ihor was sitting and said, “Here. Have of these some.” He held out his canteen.
“Thanks.” Ihor took a cautious sip. It wasn’t hashish, but it was pretty good schnapps. Aram might speak only mangled Russian and no German at all, but he had a scrounger’s gift for coming up with useful things.
“Sergeant, he big metyeryebyets.” No matter how mangled Demirchyan’s Russian was, he had no trouble with the obscenity.
“Think so, do you?” Ihor said dryly. The Armenian thought that was funny. After the schnapps mounted to Ihor’s head, he did, too. How could anyone not think Prishvin was exactly what Aram had called him?
A couple of days later, they went into action outside of Paderborn. The enemy hadn’t wasted any time retaking a large stretch of northwestern Germany after the A-bomb kicked the Red Army in the teeth. Ihor crouched behind the burnt-out hulk of a T-34/85, a survivor from the last war that hadn’t made it through this one.
He didn’t want his head to end up like the killed tank’s turret, which lay upside down ten meters away from the hull. He thought he smelled charred meat along with all the other battlefield stenches, but it might have been his imagination. He could hope so, anyhow.
Soviet artillery slammed the American lines on the eastern outskirts of the German town. “Forward!” Sergeant Prishvin shouted. “Forward for the great Stalin!”
“For Stalin!” the men yelled as they ran toward the Yanks’ foxholes and trenches. Even Ihor yelled, though he’d somehow lived through what the great Stalin had done to the Ukraine.
An American heavy machine gun in a house with an east-facing window opened up. Ihor did a swan dive behind a rock and started digging in. All around him, other Red Army men flopped to the ground and slithered toward whatever cover they could find. A couple of luckless fellows got hit before they could hit the dirt. They went down, too, bonelessly, as if they’d taken one on the button from a heavyweight. A round from that baby could punch through a couple of centimeters of hardened steel. What it did to mere flesh and blood hardly bore thinking about.
The USSR had fielded large-caliber machine guns during the last war. The Hitlerites hadn’t, so this was Ihor’s first time on the wrong end of one. He could have done without the honor.
Red Army men popped up every now and again to take shots at the house. But the heavy machine gun could kill them out past a kilometer, and they couldn’t hit back at that range. A couple of guys in the section carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but they didn’t have a prayer of getting in close enough to use them. So Ihor thought, anyway.
Sergeant Prishvin had a different view of things. He called “Forward!” again, adding, “We can get that fucker!”
He wasn’t a coward. That wasn’t what was wrong with him. He ran toward the house with flame and death spitting from the shattered window. So did some of the men he led. Ihor got up and gained thirty or forty meters; the bare-branched bushes he chose for shelter didn’t conceal him as well as he would have liked, but they were ever so much better than nothing.
One of the RPG men launched an optimistic round. It fell far short, blowing a hole in the muddy ground. Ihor fired a few times himself, though he knew he was only wasting ammo. The AK-47 wasn’t made for long-range combat. Even a sniper with a scope-sighted Mosin-Nagant would have had trouble hitting the American machine gunners from where he was.
“Forward!” Prishvin roared. “Everybody forward! Come on, you cunts, you whores, you needle dicks! We will take out that gun! For Stalin!”
Forward he went. Forward the other soldiers went, too, some of them firing from the hip as they ran to try to make the Yankees keep their heads down. Ihor bent to stick on a new magazine. One of those big, fat bullets from the machine gun cracked over his head.
And one of them hit Aram Demirchyan and knocked him to one side as if he were a crumpled sheet of newspaper. Crimson blood soaked his dun-colored tunic. He thrashed feebly for a second or two, then lay still.
Ihor yanked back the charging handle and chambered the first round. He fired several shots, first high, then lower.
“The sergeant’s down!” someone yelled. “Bozhemoi! He won’t get up again, either!”
“We better fall back!” someone else said. “We need a mortar to shift that goddamn machine gun!”
Nobody argued with him. Retreat was almost as dangerous as advancing had been. Ihor hoped no one else knew how Sergeant Prishvin had fallen. One more chance he’d have to take.
18
Luisa Hozzel shook her head. “Not for me,” she said in a mixture of German and bad Russian. “I have a man back in Germany.”
“In Germany?” Nadezhda Chukovskaya tossed her head. She was short and stocky and tough. Laughing, she went on, “Germany is the other side of the moon. You don’t have anybody here. Everybody needs somebody.”
Yes, but you aren’t the somebody I need. Luisa didn’t say it. Nadezhda was one of the two or three women with the most pull in her barracks. If she got mad at somebody, she could make that person sorry. Telling her off was a last resort.
Another soft answer, then: “Not for me. I am woman for men, not woman for other women.”
“Men!” Nadezhda laughed again, scornfully this time. “Men don’t know anything! Wait till somebody loves you who can make you feel good because she understands what makes you feel good.”
The only polite answer Luisa found to that was a shrug. She hadn’t been lying. Women didn’t stoke her fires. They never had, and she didn’t think they ever would.
The Weimar Republic might have taken lesbianism in stride, along with so much else. But by the time Luisa was old enough to notice such things and to have such feelings herself, Germany had turned away from the Weimar Republic-about as far away as it could turn. Hitler and the Nazis? To them, anything that had to do with homosexuality was degenerate and disgusting. Homosexuals didn’t reproduce, after all, and that made them unnatural and not worth keeping alive (unless, she’d heard, they happened to belong to the SS).
Teachings from the Third Reich might still linger inside her. Or her natural bent might simply be the more common one. Whatever it was, past wishing she had Gustav back she seemed immune to the lure of romance here.
Nadezhda Chukovskaya might have seen as much in her eyes. They sat side by side on Luisa’s bunk in the brief, tired interlude between supper and lights-out. Nadezhda laughed once more, this time more nastily than the first two put together.
“You want a man so much?” she said. “You want a dick in you? Go to the fence between our half of the camp and theirs. Bend over and stick your ass in the air like a washerwoman. You’ll get a dick in you, all right, dog-fashion. And nobody breaks a rule because you both stay on your own side of the wire.”
“No!” Luisa had seen that happen once or twice. She thought it was unimaginably depraved. She’d looked away as soon as she realized what was going on. Most of the time, so did other people. Once, guards had whooped and hollered and cheered the couplers on.
“Why not? You’d sooner have a man than me? That’s how you get a man here.”
That might have been one of the ways. It wasn’t the only one. She remembered all too well the barber groping her while he trimmed her bush. If she’d said yes to him, she could have had soft work inside the barbed wire, not hard labor out in the taiga. But she wanted him no more than she wanted Nadezhda. Less, if anything.