“It’s not about a man. It’s about my man,” she said.
“Your man is in Germany.” Nadezhda spoke as if to an idiot child. “Germany is I don’t know how many thousand kilometers away. Lots of thousands-I know that. You’ll never see him again. Might as well grab what fun you can here.”
Luisa only shrugged again. She had no idea whether her husband was alive or dead, either. She hadn’t told that to Nadezhda, though the Russian woman might already know it. The reason the MGB had seized so many German women in this camp was no secret. It would just have strengthened the other woman’s argument.
Nadezhda stood up, her face set in angry lines. She strode away. Her stiff back and long strides made her more mannish than ever. That didn’t add to her attractiveness, not so far as Luisa was concerned.
She would have had things easier if she’d given in to the barber. She was sure she would have things easier if she gave in to Nadezhda, too. But her body was the only thing in the camp that still belonged to her. Other zeks had slept in this bunk before her. She was sure others would after her, too. Even her clothes, with Г963 replacing some older number, were hand-me-downs that belonged to the Soviet state.
She lay down on the hard, lumpy mattress. Maybe she could claim the bedbugs that bit her as her own, too. Other bugs also called the camp home. Sometimes Luisa felt more like a stray schnauzer than a human being.
Right this minute, she felt like a worn-out stray schnauzer. As soon as she lay flat, her eyes closed. She couldn’t have stayed awake more than a minute after that. As she often did, she dreamt she was back in Fulda.
No matter what she’d been talking about with Nadezhda, her dreams had nothing to do with Gustav. They revolved around food. A chocolate cake smothered in whipped cream her mother had made when she was small. A roast duck with cherry sauce. Goose-liver sausages. A giant pork roast she’d fixed for Christmas one year, with potatoes and sauerkraut on the side. Malty beer, its foam thick enough to give you a white mustache.
You could live without a man, and even without taking a woman as a substitute for him. You couldn’t live without food. When you did hard work without enough of it, your body reminded you of that every chance it got. When you slept, it played pictures-and tastes, and smells! oh, smells!-inside your head of all the good things it wanted.
Luisa was just bringing a spoonful of fragrant beef-and-barley soup to her mouth when the raucous clang of hammer on shell casing thrust her eyes open and rudely dropped her back into the real world. Her stomach growled in anger and frustration. Whenever she listened to it, that was all it ever reported.
She had no time to listen to it now. She had to get outside as soon as she could, to stand out there in the predawn cold for the morning count. The guards had to be satisfied before the zeks ate.
Outside she went, still yawning. Cold slapped her in the face. Electric lights blazed, making the assembly area noontime bright. A bright star-would that be Venus?-shone in the east. The lights drowned out the rest of those feeble little gleams.
“Line up!” the guard shouted. “Line up, you dumb cunts!” Across the wire, the Chekists who kept an eye on the men greeted them with the same insults.
Trudl Bachman slid into place next to Luisa. “Another wonderful day here in paradise,” she murmured out of the side of her mouth, her lips scarcely moving. Talking during the count was verboten, which didn’t mean people didn’t do it anyhow.
“Aber naturlich,” Luisa answered the same way. The two women smiled at each other. If you didn’t smile, if you didn’t joke, wouldn’t you start screaming instead?
Up and down the ranks prowled the guards. Counting the women should have been easy. It would have been easy, if the men with the machine pistols had had the brains God gave a tsetse fly. As things were, they needed four tries before they were sure that the number they got matched the number they thought they were supposed to have.
Only then could the women head for breakfast, which they did at a dead run. To be so eager, so desperate, for thin cabbage soup, a lump of black bread, and weak tea only went to show what the camp was like. It would have been a starvation ration even in the worst days of the war. When it was all you had, though…
Luisa ate with an animal intensity that left her frightened. So did her fellow zeks. She was surprised when Trudl asked her, “Was that Leckschwester after you again?” Talk at breakfast seemed a rare luxury.
She managed a nod. “Nadezhda? Ja. I told her again I wasn’t interested, but she doesn’t want to listen.”
Then they hurried to the stinking latrines: a necessary part of the day, but Luisa’s least favorite. And then it was out into the snow, out into the woods, once more.
–
Gustav Hozzel turned over a Russian’s corpse. The stink that came from the dead Ivan said he’d lain there for a while. So did the way he’d swollen enough to split his tunic and his trouser legs. Normally, Gustav wouldn’t have wanted to come within a hundred meters of him.
Normally, here, meant before he’d taken that AK-47 from the other dead Russian, the one in Wesel-before the American A-bomb flattened and melted Wesel and all the Ivans in it. Now he checked every Russian’s body he came across. He had to, if he was going to keep the assault rifle in cartridges. The enemy was the only source for them. They weren’t like 7.62mm and 9mm pistol rounds, the standard calibers for machine pistols, which were made all over the world.
He made sure he turned the dead soldier by the tunic, not by his bare skin. The corpse made horrible squashing noises just the same.
Rolf laughed. “Ain’t you got fun? That piece is more trouble than it’s worth.”
“They said the same thing about your last girlfriend, right?” Gustav returned. By the way Rolf scowled, maybe they had said something like that about his latest flame. Gustav didn’t care. He pointed happily. “Will you look at that?” The Ivan had several of the distinctive curved magazine pouches for the Kalashnikov hooked to his belt. Gustav took the magazines out of them. One went into a pouch he’d lifted from another Russian. The rest he stowed in his pockets and pack.
Max Bachman pointed to a roadside sign that tilted but hadn’t got knocked flat. “Look. Next stop is outer space.”
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” Rolf jeered.
“I think it’s funny,” Gustav told Max. The sign announced that Marsberg was five kilometers away. The Germans were somewhere south of Paderborn, trying to take as much land back from the Russians as they could before the Red Army recovered from getting atom-bombed…if it did, if it could.
“Of course you two laugh at the same shit,” the ex-LAH veteran said. “You’ve been asshole buddies for God knows how long.”
“Only Arschloch I see around here is you, Rolf,” Gustav said. He figured he and Rolf would have it out one of these days. One of them would knock the crap out of the other, and they’d go on from there. Or maybe they’d rack each other up, and then they’d both get some time off from the war.
But a sputter of gunfire broke out from the direction of Marsberg. Whatever he and Rolf did to each other would have to wait. They both trotted toward the trouble, as did Max.
Russian generals spent men the way a drunk tycoon spent money on dancing girls. They kept throwing them into the fight, on the notion that whatever they were facing was bound to fall over sooner or later. It had worked for them against the Wehrmacht. They thought it would again.
“Urra!” the Red Army men shouted. The war cry always made the hair at the back of Gustav’s neck stand up in alarm. To him, it meant a swarm of drunken Ivans rolling forward like the tide, careless of whether they lived or died, and no King Canute anywhere to hold them back.