Trudl wouldn’t forget Max so casually…would she? When she’d said she would kiss a pig to escape from the outside work gang, she’d been joking…hadn’t she?
The guards baked jackets and trousers and underwear and shoes to kill bugs and eggs. It was hard on the clothes, but it worked-for a few days, anyhow. But they couldn’t bake all the bedding. They couldn’t bake the whole barracks, which was what they really needed to do. Inevitably, she’d start itching and scratching again soon.
Coming out of the oven, the clothes were still hot when she put them back on. That had felt wonderful when winter was at its worst. Now, with the weather warming again, it wasn’t quite so great, but plenty of other women besides her sighed with pleasure as they got dressed.
Trudl came up. She found the clothes with her number painted on them. She sighed, too, when she put them on. In the gulag, enjoyment was where you found it, only you couldn’t find it in very many places.
Then again, you could find it if you went looking for it. “Is that barber a friend of yours?” Luisa asked, as casually as she could.
That wasn’t casually enough. “No, not really,” Trudl answered, her voice much colder than her jacket and trousers. “And even if he were, how does that make it your business?”
“I didn’t say it was my business. I just asked,” Luisa said. “It’s only that our husbands are friends if they’re still alive, and I hope to heaven that they are.”
“So do I, aber naturlich,” Trudl said. “But do you think we’ll ever see them again? We’re halfway around the world, we’re in this prison camp, and we’re behind the Iron Curtain. This is the only life we’ve got, Luisa. If it doesn’t get any better than it is now, is it worth living?”
Is getting a full stomach and a soft job worth prostituting yourself for? Is your life worth living after you do? Luisa knew that, if she asked that of Trudl, the husbands might still be friends, but the wives wouldn’t. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t asked the same questions of herself. Up till now, she’d answered them both with a no.
Up till now. How long in this camp before she changed her mind? That was the real question, the scary question, because Trudl wasn’t wrong.
22
A tank clanked past Gustav Hozzel. He looked at it with faint, or not so faint, contempt. He hadn’t seen many Shermans on the Eastern Front. The Ivans got some as Lend-Lease from America, but German panzer crews worried about them much less than about the far more common T-34s. They did make trouble for German ground-pounders when no Wehrmacht panzers were around to knock them out. As the Ostfront slowly came to pieces, that happened ever more often.
His first thought on seeing this one was that it stood an even worse chance against modern Russian armor than it would have against a Panzer IV or a Panther. His second thought…“I’ll be fucked!” he exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t mind that myself about now,” Rolf said with a lewd grin.
“Oh, shut up,” Gustav told him. He pointed at the Sherman. “What do you see?”
“When I was in the Battle of the Bulge, we called them Tommy cookers,” Rolf answered. “One good hit and they’d burn like blazes.” His chuckle showed he meant that for a joke. It was as much of a sense of humor as he ever showed.
“Ja, ja,” Gustav said impatiently. “But look at the recognition mark on the side of the turret.”
Rolf looked. His jaw dropped. “Donnerwetter,” he muttered. Had he been a Catholic, he might have crossed himself.
“Uh-huh.” Gustav nodded. The mark wasn’t the white American star or the blue-and-white roundel the English were using these days. It was a white-edged black cross, as familiar to Gustav as the scar on the back of his left hand. “We’ve got our own panzers again! Panzers with Germans in them! See how the Russians like that!”
Max Bachman had less nationalistic fervor than Gustav (to say nothing of Rolf), and more hard common sense. “They’re only Shermans,” he said. “Ivan will like it fine. The Germans in those Shermans? Maybe not so much. It’s murder to send them out against T-54s.”
“Probably just what the Americans have in mind,” Rolf said. “What do you want to bet? Plenty of us have been yelling to get a chance in panzers again. So they give us what we say we want-and they get rid of our panzer crews as fast as we can train ’em. These are what we’ve got left, they’ll say. Take ’em or leave ’em. Of course we take ’em. And of course we pay the price.”
That was the most ridiculous thing Gustav had ever heard…till he thought about it for a little while. The more he did, the more of a certain kind of sense it made. Germans these days, like children growing away from the dark times of the Third Reich, did want to do as much for themselves as they could. How could the Americans help but worry that their allies would get too big for their britches and see that they were the strongest power in Western Europe even now?
Panzers? You need panzers? Here, we’ll give you some Shermans. They weren’t much good in the last war. They wouldn’t have been any good at all if we hadn’t made a million of ’em. But we did, and so we’ve still got a bunch in storage. Go ahead, use ’em. And if your crews die like ants at an anteaters’ picnic, well, just remember, you asked for it.
Max’s face said he was going through similar mental contortions. After a few seconds, he said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Why the hell not?” Rolf demanded. “The Fuhrer would have done it. Stalin would do it. Christ, Stalin is doing it. The Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians, their shit isn’t near as good as what the Russians use. You think that’s an accident?”
“No. But I spent five years in Fulda dealing with the Amis,” Max answered. “They don’t play that kind of deep game. It’s hard to get them to worry about day after tomorrow, let alone about what they do now will mean ten years down the road.”
“What about the Marshall Plan?” Gustav said.
“Mm, there is that,” Max admitted. “The Marshall Plan’s about as long-term as anything a good Communist would do. Most of the time, though, the Yankees are plenty good at tactics and not so hot with strategy.”
Another German Sherman rattled by the shell hole the soldiers shared. The commander rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, the way the man in charge of a panzer should have. He looked no more than twenty years old, and as proud of himself as if he’d invented the machine he rode in.
Nodding in his direction, Gustav said, “Max, I’d find it easier to go along with you if that guy were an old sweat like us. But a Feld who was in charge of a Panzer IV the last time would know better than to climb into that motorized herring tin now.”
“You’re right,” Rolf said. That wasn’t the kind of encouragement Gustav wanted, but he had it whether he wanted it or not.
A sergeant trotted along with the panzers. He scowled at the soldiers sitting in the hole in the ground with cigarettes in their mouths. “Come on, darlings!” he called shrilly, and blew them a kiss. “You’re invited to the dance, too.”
“If somebody hadn’t invited his mother to the dance, she wouldn’t’ve got knocked up and had him,” Gustav muttered. But he didn’t pitch his voice loud enough for the noncom to hear. Instead, he yanked back the AK-47’s charging handle to chamber the first round from a fresh magazine. Then he climbed out of the shell hole and moved forward.
Max and Rolf came, too. Not much went on for a little while. They moved forward several hundred meters. There was only light fire, and none of it close enough to tempt them to hit the deck. Gustav saw a couple of dead Russians, but no live ones. He approved. If he never saw another live Russian as long as he lived, he wouldn’t be sorry.