Leon’s face clouded. “I already did that one.”
“Mommy didn’t see you do it,” Aaron reminded him. “Find the A again, and then she’ll give you a new letter.”
“Oh, okay.” Leon might have reached a deal for the price of a secondhand car. He picked up the A and held it over his head, as if to show this was really too easy for someone of his talents.
“That’s the A, all right,” Ruth said. “Now show me the Q.”
“Ten points!” Leon sang out. Aaron and Ruth looked at each other. Yes, they played Scrabble, but Aaron had never expected Leon to pick that up. His son had no trouble finding the wooden letter. “It’s got a little tail, like a piggy,” he said. That was how Aaron had told him to know which was the Q and which the O.
Aaron had made the blocks only a couple of months earlier. He hadn’t thought Leon would be ready for them yet, but the kid kept surprising him. By now, Leon could reliably pick out almost all the letters. E and F sometimes confused him, and every so often he’d use an upside-down W for an M or vice versa. Other than that, he had them straight.
“One of these days before too long,” Aaron said, “I’m going to dig out my old reader.” He and Marvin had both learned to read from it. It was made, and made well, to show little kids how to put letters together to make words. Marvin had used it to help teach Olivia how to read. When Aaron had a son, he’d passed it along.
“He’s not ready to read yet,” Ruth said, but then she softened it by adding, “I don’t think.”
“Well, I don’t think he is, either, not yet,” Aaron admitted. “I said before not too long, not right this minute.”
“Okay.” His wife nodded, perhaps with relief.
Oblivious to them both, Leon built a tower out of the letters. They were also good for that. Then he finished reenacting Babel from the Bible by knocking the tower over like an angry Jehovah. “Kaboom!” he yelled as the letters flew and bounced and cartwheeled every which way.
Destruction complete, Leon started to head off to some new mayhem. “Hang on a second, sport,” Aaron said, holding up a hand like a traffic cop. “What do you do after you make a mess? We were just talking about that, remember?”
If Aaron hadn’t asked if he remembered, Leon would have been all the more tempted to forget. But he couldn’t resist showing off how much he knew. “You police it up.” He even got the word right.
“Why don’t you do that, then? Put the letters back in the box I made for them,” Aaron said.
That wasn’t Leon’s idea of fun. You always had a better time making your mess than cleaning it up afterwards-a great human truth not enough people thought about ahead of time. But Leon must also have remembered the dreadful prospect of a night without Bounce. He started retrieving letters and returned them to the ABC box.
“You still need to get the G and the N,” Ruth said when Leon looked as if he thought he was done. “They’re over there by the coffee table.”
“Hoo, boy,” Leon said.
Aaron laughed so hard, he started coughing. Words and intonation were a perfect imitation of Ruth when she had to do something else on top of everything she’d already done. The world might have been too much with Leon, but he went over and got the last two letters.
“Anybody would think he listens to us or something,” Ruth said.
“Little pitchers have big ears, yeah,” Aaron said. “Wait till he turns sixteen, though. See if he hears a word we tell him then.”
He’d be in his mid-sixties himself when Leon hit sixteen. He wondered whether he’d be able to keep up with a boy who imagined himself a man. That worry was still years away, though. For now, he lit another Chesterfield.
–
It was late in the year for snow. The stuff drifted down over north-central Germany, thick and wet. The sky was gray. The land was white. Color seemed to have washed out of the world.
“Christ, you’d hardly think this was Germany,” Gustav Hozzel said. “Reminds me of the Ukraine in 1943.”
“Me, I was thinking of Spring Awakening in Hungary in ’45,” Rolf said. “Except it was more rain and less snow then. When we got the move order, I watched the Tigers bog down in the mud and I thought, Shit, this won’t work the way they planned it.”
“Well, you were right about that.” Max Bachman said it before Gustav could. They looked at each other. Neither of them was in the habit of saying such a thing to Rolf.
“Hey, we drove the Ivans back in spite of the shitty weather,” Rolf said. “We pushed ’em for a solid week, made ’em retreat, thirty, forty, some places even fifty kilometers. Even in March of 1945, we were better soldiers than they ever dreamt of being.”
He was a Waffen-SS veteran, all right. He remained proud of everything the LAH and the other SS panzer divisions had accomplished. He ignored everything they’d done that made almost all the other countries in the world ally with Stalin against the Nazis. And he ignored the bitter crack from Sepp Dietrich, who’d commanded the Sixth SS Panzer Army during Operation Spring Awakening-They call us the Sixth Panzer Army because we’ve only got six panzers.
“Rolf…” Gustav put things as gently as he could: “How much good did driving the Russians back fifty kilometers do for the war? Didn’t we lose just as fast as if you’d stayed in the barracks and played skat? It was March of 1945, for God’s sake. The Reich was screwed coming, going, and sideways.”
“We fought hard anyway,” Rolf said. “We didn’t know how messed up things were all over.”
“You didn’t? You weren’t looking real hard, were you?” Max said. “Why did you think we were in Hungary instead of in Russia, the way we were a year earlier? Did we fall back so the Magyars could teach us to dance the fucking mazurka?”
“You know what you’ve got, Bachman? You’ve got a goddamn big mouth.” Rolf tapped a Lucky from an American ration pack against the back of his hand before he stuck it in his own mouth.
You know what you’ve got, Rolf? You’ve got a goddamn small brain. Gustav was tempted to come out with it, but he didn’t. There were things over which he and Max would never agree with Rolf. Agree with him or not, though, the ex-LAH man was somebody good to have on your side. Next to that, the arguments about what had been, what might have been, and what should have been were nothing serious.
The three Germans and their countrymen sat in the wreckage on the east side of Warberg, a small town ten or fifteen kilometers east of Marsberg. The front south of Paderborn hadn’t moved much lately. The Ivans weren’t giving ground the way they had right after the A-bombs smashed them farther west. They fought hard when the Germans came at them, and hit back hard whenever they saw a chance.
“Hello!” Rolf pointed east. “What the devil’s that about?” Hard suspicion filled his voice.
Flares flew into the low-ceilinged sky: red and green and white together. The Russians didn’t normally use that kind of signal. Here, Gustav found himself agreeing with Rolf once more. Any time the Ivans did something unfamiliar, you found yourself wondering and worrying about what was up.
Gustav didn’t have to wonder long. Drawn by those flares, a squadron of Shturmoviks zoomed in from the east to shoot up Warberg and pound it with bombs and rockets. The Germans on the ground fired at the Il-10s with rifles and submachine guns and machine guns.
Even as Gustav emptied his assault rifle into the air, he knew he was wasting ammo. Two of the nicknames Landsers had given the Shturmovik in the last war were Flying Tank and Iron Gustav. Engine and cockpit were both heavily armored, making the attack plane invulnerable to small arms.
But the Ivans got a nasty surprise of their own. Three American jet fighters swooped down on the Shturmoviks from above. They were straight-winged F-80s, planes hardly better than the Luftwaffe’s Me-262 (as Rolf would have been sure to point out had Gustav said anything about them). They far outclassed the prop-driven attack aircraft, though. In less than two minutes, three Shturmoviks were burning wrecks, their corpses sending pillars of greasy black smoke up to the clouds. The rest of the Il-10s raced east as fast as they could, hoping to find a country where such things didn’t happen.