Another old woman-a babushka in the grandmotherly sense of the word-hobbled toward the Germans. In her apron she carried several rings of dark, chewy-looking bread. Jager stomach growled the second he saw it.
He took two rings. Schultz took three. It was food fit for peasants, he knew; back in Munster, before the war, he would have turned up his nose at black bread. But compared to some of the things he’d eaten in Russia-and especially compared to nothing at all, of which he’d had far too much lately-it was manna from heaven.
Georg Schultz somehow managed to cram a whole ring of bread into his mouth at once. His cheeks bulged until he looked like a snake trying to swallow a fat toad. The kolkhozniks giggled and nudged one another. The gunner, his face beatific, ignored them. His jaws worked and worked. Every so often, he swallowed. His enormous cud of bread began to shrink.
“That’s not the best way to do it, Sergeant,” Jager said. “See, I’ve almost managed to finish both of mine while you were eating that one.”
“I was too hungry to wait,” Schultz answered blurrily-his mouth was still pretty full.
The babushka went away, came back with a couple of carved wooden mugs of milk. It was so fresh, it warmed Jager’s cup. Its creamy richness went well with the earthy, mouth-fifing taste of the bread. Peasants’ food, yes, but a peasant who ate it every day was likely to be a contented man.
For politeness’ sake, Jager declined more, though he could have eaten another two dozen rings-or so he thought-without filling himself up. He drained the mug of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, asked the kolkhoz chief the most important question he could think of: “Eidechsen?” He necessarily used the German word for Lizards; he did not know how to say it in Russian. He waved his hand along the horizon to show he wanted to find out where the aliens were.
The kolkhozniks didn’t get it. Jager pantomimed short creatures, imitated the unmistakable screech of their airplanes as best he could. The kolkhoz chief’s eyes lit up. “Ah-yasheritsi,” he said. The peasants clustered round him exclaimed. Jager memorized the word; he had the feeling he would need it again.
The chief pointed south. Jager knew there were Lizards in that direction; that was the way he’d come. Then the chief pointed east, but made pushing motions with his hands, as if to say the Lizards over there weren’t close. Jager nodded to show he understood. And then the kolkhoz chief pointed west. He didn’t do any dumb show to indicate the Lizards thereabouts were far away, either.
Jager looked at Georg Schultz. Schultz was looking at him, too. He suspected he looked as unhappy as the gunner did. If there were Lizards between them and the bulk of the Wehrmacht… Jager didn’t care to follow that thought to its logical conclusion. For that matter, if there were Lizards over that way, the Wehrmacht might not have much left in the way of bulk.
The kolkhoz chief gave him another piece of bad news: “Berlin kaput, Germanski. Yasheritsi.” He used those expressive hands of his to show the city going up in a single huge explosion.
Schultz grunted as if he’d been kicked in the belly. Jager felt hollow and empty inside, himself. He couldn’t imagine Berlin gone, or Germany with Berlin gone. He tried not to believe it. “Maybe they’re lying,” Schultz said hoarsely. “Maybe it’s just the God-damned Russian radio.”
“Maybe.” But the more Jager studied the kolkhozniks, the less he believed that. If they’d gloated at his reaction to the news, he would have doubted them more, have thought they were trying to fool him. But while a few looked pleased at his discomfiture (as was only natural, when his country and theirs had spent a year locked in a huge, vicious embrace), most looked at him and his companion with sympathetic eyes and somber faces. That convinced him he needed to worry.
He found a useful Russian word: “Nichevo.” He knew he pronounced it badly; German had to use the clumsy letter-group tsch even to approximate the sound that lay at its heart.
But the kolkhozniks understood. “Tovarisch, nichevo,” one of them said: Comrade, it can’t be helped, there’s nothing to be done about it. It was a very Russian word indeed: the Russians were-and needed to be-long on resignation.
He hadn’t quite meant it that way. He explained what he had meant: “Berlin da, yasheritsi-” He ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Berlin nyet, yasheritsi-” He ground his heel into the dirt again.
Some of the Russians clapped their hands, admiring his determination. Some looked at him as if he was crazy. Maybe I am, Jager thought. He hadn’t imagined anyone could hurt Germany as the Lizards had hurt it. Poland, France, and the Low Countries had gone down like ninepins. England fought on, but was walled away from Europe. And though the Soviet Union remained on its feet, Jager was sure the Germans would have finished it by the end of 1942. The fighting south of Kharkov showed the Ivans hadn’t learned much, no matter how many of them there were.
But the Lizards-the Lizards were an imponderable. They weren’t the soldiers they might have been, but their gear was so good it didn’t always matter. He’d found that out for himself, the hard way.
A faint buzz in the sky, far off to northward. Jager’s head whipped around. Any sky noise was alarming these days, doubly so when it might come from an almost invulnerable Lizard aircraft. This, though, was no Lizard plane. “Just one of the Ivans’ flying sewing machines, Major-not worth jumping out of your skin for.”
“Anything that’s up there without a swastika on it makes me nervous.”
“Can’t blame you for that, I guess. But if we aren’t safe from the Red Air Force here in the middle of a kolkhoz, we aren’t safe anywhere.” The tank gunner ran a hand along his gingery whiskers. “Of course, these days we really aren’t safe anywhere.”
The Soviet biplane didn’t go into a strafing run, although Jager saw it carried machine guns. It skimmed over the collective farm, a couple of hundred meters off the ground. Its little engine did indeed make a noise like a sewing machine running flat out.
The plane banked, turned in what looked like an impossibly tight circle, came back over the knot of people gathered around the two Germans. This time it flew lower. Several kolkhozniks waved up at the pilot, who was clearly visible in the open cockpit, goggles, leather flying helmet, and all.
The biplane banked once more, now north of the collective farm again. When it turned once more, it was plainly on a landing run. Dust spurted up as its wheels touched the ground. It bounced along, slowed to a stop.
“Don’t know as how I like this, sir,” Schultz said. “Dealing with the Russians here is one thing, but that plane, that’s part of the Red Air Force. We shouldn’t have anything to do with something connected to the Bolshevik government like that.”
“I know we shouldn’t, Sergeant, but everything’s gone to hell since the Lizards got here,” Jager answered. “Besides, what choice have we?” Too many kolkhozniks carried guns to let him think about hijacking the toy plane with the red star on its flank, even assuming he knew how to fly it-which he didn’t.
The pilot was climbing out of the plane, putting his booted foot in the stirrup on the side of the dusty fuselage below his seat. His boot, his seat? No, Jager saw: a blond braid stuck out under the back of the flying helmet, and the cheeks under those goggles (now shoved up onto the top of the flying helmet) had never known-or needed-a razor. Even baggy flying clothes could not long conceal a distinctly unmasculine shape.