“We’ll all sleep hard tonight,” Konstantin said. Of course, they all would have slept hard without the schnapps, too. When war gave you a chance, you curled up and hibernated like a wintering bear. He also knew he still didn’t have the full strength and energy he’d enjoyed before his bout with radiation sickness. Neither did Eigims or Sarkisyan. They functioned, but they were still damaged. In that, they were much like the army of which they made up a tiny part.
Next morning, Konstantin dry-swallowed aspirins. Schnapps hurt him worse than vodka did. His headache was in retreat when Captain Lezkov, the regimental CO, summoned his tank commanders. “We are ordered to make another attack in the direction of Paderborn,” he said.
None of the sergeants said anything. Most of them were men Konstantin’s age, men who’d put in their share of attacks in this fight and more than their share during the Great Patriotic War. When the brass told you attack in the direction of Somewhere-or-other, they didn’t think you’d get there. From the way the fighting had been going, Morozov didn’t think they’d get to Paderborn, either. The enemy had their tails up. They also had more bazookas than they knew what to do with.
“I will be in the lead tank,” Captain Lezkov said. “I promise you, no one will get ahead of me. We will do what we are commanded to do. How do you like that, comrades?”
“We serve the Soviet Union!” the sergeants chorused. And the Soviet Union serves us, too-medium-rare, Konstantin thought.
He delivered the news to his crew. “And we’ll be the point tank for our platoon?” Demyan Belitsky asked, sounding gloomily sure he already knew the answer.
And he did. Konstantin nodded. “That’s how they’re going to do it.”
“Maybe we’ll stay lucky one more time,” the driver said.
“Or maybe something will break down and they’ll have to leave us behind. That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?” Ilya Goledod said.
Morozov eyed the bow gunner. “That won’t happen. Not a chance. And if you try to make it happen, I’ll tie you to a post so the MGB firing squad can finish you off. Is that clear enough, or shall I draw you a picture, too?”
The bow gunner licked his lips. “That’s very clear, Comrade Sergeant.”
Nothing broke down. They clattered forward with the rest of the regiment. They’d got about a kilometer and a half closer to Paderborn when a bazooka round slammed into the engine compartment. The T-34/85 slewed sideways and stopped.
“Out!” Konstantin yelled. “Out as quick as you can! The next one blows us all to the Devil!” He scrambled out the cupola and jumped to the mud below. By what would do for a miracle, everyone escaped. Maybe that was the last round the bastard with the stovepipe had. But they wouldn’t see the inside of Paderborn, not without a new tank, or even a new old tank, they wouldn’t.
–
“Come on, you stupid pussies!” the camp guard shouted. “Come on, you sheep! Baaa! Time to get washed! Time to get sheared!”
Luisa Hozzel and Trudl Bachman made identical revolted faces at each other. They both hated this part of camp routine worse than anything else, even standing in ranks waiting for the morons counting them to be sure they had their numbers straight.
“It could be worse,” Trudl said resignedly.
“How?” Luisa demanded.
“He could have yelled, ‘To the showers!’?”
“Oh.” Luisa had no comeback to that. Who possibly could? When SS guards sent Jews to the showers after they stumbled out of cattle cars at the camps in Poland, they got cyanide instead of hot water. The only way they left those camps was through the crematorium chimneys.
These Soviet gulags weren’t designed to murder you as soon as you arrived. Had they been, Luisa and her countrywomen would have been long dead. The Russians weren’t just out to murder people. They wanted to get work out of them, too. If they didn’t feed them enough or give them enough rest for the work they did, if zeks broke down and died in large numbers because they didn’t, that was a by-product of their system, not its planned result, as it had been with the Nazis.
The people who died were just as dead either way, of course.
“You’d better hurry up, cunts!” the guard said. “Or else I’ll kick your skinny asses all the way to the bathhouse!”
He meant it. He’d do it. He’d laugh while he did it, too. Luisa had seen him and his pals in action before. She’d felt his boot, or that of one of his comrades. And if her behind was skinnier now than it had been before she got to this awful place, that was the Reds’ fault, not hers. Gustav had always liked how she gave him plenty to grab.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad this time,” Trudl said as she and Luisa and the rest of the women from their barracks shambled toward the baths.
“And then you wake up!” Luisa didn’t believe it for a minute. The baths and the clipping were always bad. Sometimes they were horrible.
Guards leered and whooped as the zeks peeled off their clothes and climbed into the tubs of water and harsh disinfectant. So did the bitches who took their pleasure from other women. As usual, Luisa tried to imagine everything was happening to someone else, not to her. As usual, she failed. However much she longed for that kind of detachment, she didn’t have it.
Despite the antiseptic reek and the guards’ relentless eyes, she enjoyed the bath. Hot water was a precious rarity in the camp. She wished she could soak in there, but the guards didn’t let you get away with that. You climbed in, you scrubbed, and they herded you out.
It did make sense. That way, they could funnel all the zeks through the baths as quickly as possible. Time wasted on maintaining their bodily well-being was time when they weren’t working. And what was a corrective-labor camp for, after all, if not corrective labor?
Naked, dripping, and rapidly getting cold, Luisa walked to the waiting barbers. Again, she did her best to pretend that none of this was happening to her. Again, that failed. It failed all the more completely because she found herself walking up to the man who’d clipped and fondled her when she first came, bewildered, into the camp.
“How do you like logging?” he asked in his accented German as he set to work.
“Not very much,” Luisa answered: such an obvious truth that she saw no point in wasting time lying about it.
The way his eyes traveled her body made her want to hit him. Only fear of what would happen to her if she did held her back. “You’re scrawnier than you were,” he said, as if that were her fault.
Luisa shrugged. “And so?”
“Lift your arms,” he said. Hating him, she obeyed. While he worked the clippers, he went on, “And so you don’t have to be, if you stay inside the wire with somebody who takes care of you.”
“Somebody like you, you mean?”
He nodded. “Ja. You take care of me, I take care of you, you don’t go to sleep with an empty belly every night.” He sheared away her pubic hair. As he had before, he felt her there while he did.
As it had before, it roused disgust and rage in her, not the lust he hoped for. “I’d sooner starve than give myself to you,” she said in tones that should have shriveled him to a raisin.
He only laughed. “Well, you’re on your way,” he said. “You’re lucky I still even notice you, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. Pretty soon, there won’t be enough of you left to bother with.”
“Are you finished, you-thing, you?”
He didn’t swat her on the backside, the way he had before. He patted her two or three times instead, as if he had every right to rest his hand there. That was worse. “I’m finished, all right,” he answered. “You’ll be finished yourself before long if you don’t get some sense.”
She walked off, her back stiff with fury she had no other way to show. As she started down the hall to retrieve her clothes, she saw Trudl Bachman laughing at something the man clipping her had said. Laughing!