Sarah went out shopping with her mother. When she was small, she remembered, she'd really enjoyed that. When she was small, they could walk into any shop in Munster and buy whatever they wanted. Shopkeepers fawned on them, as they fawned on any other customers.
Everything changed after the Nazis took over. Brownshirts stuck big signs-GERMANS! DON'T BUY FROM JEWS!-on the windows of Jewish-owned stores. And Jews were no longer welcome in shops run by Aryans. Some of the German shopkeepers seemed embarrassed about it. They did what they had to do to get along, no more. Others, though…Others gloated. Those were the scary ones.
Only a handful of shops Jews could go into were left now. The war'd just made things worse-not only for Jews, but for everybody. And the British air raids added to the burden of fear. The people across the street-Aryans-never stopped complaining about how their favorite bakery was gone. "Like someone yanked a tooth. It's not there any more," Frau Breisach would grumble.
She didn't know when she was well off. Of course she doesn't-she's an Aryan, Sarah thought. The one bakery in Munster that Jews could still use was way over on the far side of town. It wasn't open very often, and didn't have much when it was. But when the choice lay between not much and nothing at all…you went over to the far side of town.
They had a little wire basket with wheels. Sarah pulled it along behind her. It felt like nothing now. On the way back, it would be heavier. She hoped it would, anyhow. Sometimes the bakery didn't open, or it was sold out, or…I won't think about any of that, Sarah told herself fiercely.
A gang of laborers was repairing a bomb crater in the middle of the street. And there was Saul, as deft with a shovel as Father was with Greek irregular verbs. He turned the Nazi slogan on its head: he drew joy through strength.
The gang overseer was a wizened little man in his forties. The left sleeve of his shirt was pinned-up and empty. Maimed in the war, Sarah thought. Maimed in the last war, she amended. How many would get maimed in this one? Too many-that seemed sure.
Maimed or not, he carried a swagger stick in his right hand. He also had a foul mouth, and didn't care if women heard him use it. "Work harder, you lazy prick!" he yelled, and lightly swatted a laborer on the behind.
"Ja, ja," the fellow muttered, and went on working the same way he had before.
That didn't make the overseer any happier. "And you, too, you fucking kike!" he bellowed. When he hit Saul in the back with the swagger stick, it was no tap. The whack echoed like a gunshot. Sarah thought it would have knocked her over.
It barely staggered her big brother. Saul Goldman responded with what had to be instinct, as he might have on the soccer pitch. He'd been hit. He had a weapon in his hands. He used it. The flat of the shovel blade crashed into the side of the overseer's head.
The man went down as if he'd stopped an artillery shell. His skull was all caved in and bloody. Sarah and her mother let out identical shrieks of horror-anyone could see that the overseer would never get up again.
Saul stared at the man he'd killed. He stared at his mother and his sister-all that in maybe a second and a half. Then he threw down the gore-spattered shovel. It clattered on the cobbles. He turned and ran as if a million demons were at his heels.
"After him!" one of the other laborers shouted. Chasing a Jew was more fun than fixing a bomb crater any day of the week. The gang pounded after Saul, some of them still brandishing their spades.
Sarah and her mother looked at each other, each mirroring the other's anguish. As if on cue, they both burst into tears. A FRENCH PRIVATE FIRST CLASS wore a little brown hash mark on his sleeve to distinguish him from an ordinary private. Luc Harcourt was less than delighted when the indestructible Sergeant Demange told him he'd been promoted. "I'd've had more fun getting the clap," he said.
Demange's Gitane twitched as he chuckled. "Think of it as congratulations for living this long," he said.
Luc did. Suddenly, being a private first class looked a lot better. He said so, adding, "After all the shit I've gone through to get this, I'll be a general by the time the war finally ends."
"France is in trouble, yes. I hope to Christ France isn't in that much trouble," Demange said.
"Kiss my ass," Luc said. The sergeant only laughed. Luc had earned the right to swear at him. He did remember that he had to pick his spots with care.
"Anyway, sew that stupid thing on," Sergeant Demange told him. "You could be leading a squad at five minutes' notice. Hell, a couple of lucky German shell bursts and you could be leading a platoon."
He wasn't kidding. Luc had seen how fast casualties could chew a unit to pieces. He and Demange were two of not very many men who'd been with the company since before the German blow fell on the Low Countries. The rest were replacements, or replacements of replacements, or sometimes…
Luc didn't want to command a squad, much less a platoon. All he wanted to do was hunker down tight, live through the war, and get on with his life. Not that anyone from Sergeant Demange on up cared what he wanted, of course.
"See? I told you France was in trouble," the veteran underofficer said. "And you will be, too, if you don't get cracking."
"Right." Luc knew better than to argue. Somewhere in his pack he had a little housewife with needle and thread. He dug it out and sewed on the hash mark. He would never put a seamstress out of business. He'd sewn up a couple of rips in his uniform. His stitches were large and dark and ugly, like the ones that held together the pieces of the Frankenstein monster in the American film.
French 75s threw shells at the Germans on the other side of the Aisne. Luc's company was dug in a couple of kilometers west of Soissons. The town had taken a beating in the Franco-Prussian War and again in the Great War. Now it was catching hell one more time. Luc had come through it on the way to this position. Bombs and shells had wrecked the cathedral; bits of thirteenth-century stained glass lay shattered in the streets. A priest stood by the ruins with tears running down his face. Luc had no tears left for people, let alone things.
Machine guns started stuttering up by the river. French or German? Luc wondered, cocking his head to one side to hear better. Both, he thought. That wasn't so good.
Sergeant Demange must have decided the same thing. "Are those shitheads trying to force a crossing?" he growled. "They'd better not get over, that's all I've got to say."
"Let's move!" Luc grabbed his rifle. He liked the idea of Germans on the south bank of the Aisne no better than Demange.
As they hurried up toward the riverbank, they gathered as many other soldiers as they could. Damned if that hash mark on Luc's sleeve didn't make ordinary privates follow him without arguing or asking a lot of questions. I could get used to this, he thought.
There was smoke on the river: not the ordinary war smoke of burning houses and vehicles, but a thick chemical haze the Germans used to mask what they were doing on the other side. Out of the smoke came black rubber boats paddled by field-gray soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets. Sure as the devil, the Boches were trying to get over.
French machine guns stammered out death again. A German dropped his paddle and slumped down in his raft. Then another one got hit, and another. The raft slewed sideways. It was probably leaking, too. German machine guns across the Aisne shot back, trying to silence the French fire. They put out more rounds per minute than the ones the French used, but they couldn't knock them out of action.
Luc flopped down behind some bushes and started shooting at the Germans in their rafts. It wasn't fair-they couldn't shoot back. That bothered him till a couple of machine-gun bullets cracked past maybe half a meter above his head. They cured any chivalrous notions he might have had.
Two or three rubber rafts actually made it to the south bank of the Aisne. The unhurt Germans in them jumped up and tried to set up some kind of bridgehead. With all that French firepower concentrated on them, they never had a chance. Inside of a few minutes, they were all dead or wounded.