They bounced once when they hit the airstrip. Riding the brakes, Mouradian brought the Pe-2 to a stop. He pulled off his flying helmet. Beside him, Isa Mogamedov followed suit. “Another one down,” the Azeri said.
“We’ll probably go out again tomorrow,” Stas answered. He’d read Shakespeare only in Russian, which he figured put him level with the poet: it wasn’t his language, and it wasn’t the Englishman’s, either. Even in translation, though, he remembered some tolling lines:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
He remembered them, yes. He only wished he could forget them.
Ropes and sawhorses with boards across them kept civilians out of the square in front of Münster’s cathedral. In a way, that annoyed Sarah Bruck. Now she had to take a long detour to get from the shops back to her house. Life was hard enough for Jews without any more added tsuris.
In another way … She’d called things when she hoped out loud that RAF bombs would land there. They’d damaged the cathedral. That was a shame because it was a handsome building that had stood for centuries. But they’d done worse to the SS men garrisoned in the square to hold the cathedral against Münster’s Catholic community.
Those barricades weren’t there just to keep people from falling and hurting themselves in bomb craters. They were there so civilians wouldn’t see what had happened to the Nazis’ Übermenschen and their tools of war.
The bodies were gone now. Sarah’s father hadn’t taken them away, but he’d been cleaning rubble in the square when the people who were in charge of such things came to do their jobs. His comment was, “I’ve seen bad things in bombed-out houses. I saw worse things in the trenches during the Kaiser’s war. But I never saw anything that bad before.”
Here and there, glancing in as she hurried past, Sarah could still make out bloodstains on stones and bricks. Once the blood soaked in, you had a devil of a time washing it out. You had to paint over it, and even then you could sometimes see it, like the ghost of death.
You could smell it, too. Sarah’s nostrils twitched at that faint odor, like a pork roast that hadn’t gone into the icebox. She didn’t think she’d ever smelled death till the war started. She knew that stench much too well now.
Speaking of paint … Someone had daubed a graffito on a wall. God’s vengeance for Bishop von Galen, it said. The letters ran into one another, and paint dripped down from them. The commentator must have sneaked out in the dead of night and written while he couldn’t see what he was doing. He managed to get his message across even so.
If anyone had caught him doing it … Sarah didn’t like to think what would have happened after that. The Gestapo had all kinds of ingenious tools for making people unhappy.
That people were already unhappy with the regime, she knew. That they were unhappy enough to keep showing their unhappiness was new. The authorities’ response seemed to be that, if they killed enough unhappy people, and killed them publicly enough, the rest would either stop being unhappy or stop daring to show they were unhappy. The first struck Sarah as unlikely. The second? Maybe not.
She hurried away from the graffito. If a policeman or a blackshirt saw she was near it, he’d also see the yellow Stars of David on her clothes. He’d put two and two together and get five. But would he care? Not even a little bit, not when he’d nabbed a Jew.
She’d done better shopping than she often managed these days. She had a pretty good head of cabbage in her stringbag, along with some parsnips and rhubarb that cattle wouldn’t have turned up their noses at. Considering what was usually in the shops, especially in the late-afternoon hours when the Nazis let Jews get what the Aryans hadn’t bought, it was something of a triumph.
A tram rattled past. It was as sorry as everything else in civilian Münster these days. Its iron wheels were rusty. Rust streaked the fading paint on the side of the car, too. No one had touched it up since the fighting started, and that was a long time ago now. The whining electric motor sounded as if it would turn up its toes and die any day now. Of course, it had sounded that way for the past year and a half, so maybe it wouldn’t.
She watched it go without trying to flag it down: one more thing that would land a Jew in hot water. Public transport was for Aryans only. Jews had to hoof it.
She wouldn’t have got far with this one, anyhow. So she told herself, and not all in the attitude of the fox convinced the grapes had to be sour. The Aryans would be getting out three or four blocks ahead. A labor gang had filled in a big bomb crater in the middle of the street, but no one had laid replacement tracks yet.
Sarah wondered whether the new tracks would ever come. They were made of steel, after all, and steel went into panzers and U-boats and big guns and helmets and a host of other things soldiers and sailors and flyers needed. What soldiers and sailors and flyers needed, the Reich gave them.
Civilians in Münster? They were a different story. They would eat whatever the soldiers didn’t want. If they needed to get off the tram, walk past the damaged stretch in the line, wait for another car, and board again, Party Bonzen didn’t care. It was all part of the war effort, wasn’t it? After Germany won, civilians wouldn’t need to do things like that any more.
After Germany won. If Germany won.
Quietly, people were starting to wonder what would happen if Germany lost. People a generation ahead of Sarah remembered what things had been like after the last war: the shortages, the humiliation, the crazy inflation that turned years of savings into pocket change. Everybody seemed convinced it would be worse this time around.
Sarah’s mother seemed pleased at the vegetables she’d brought home. “They’ll go fine with the barley cakes in the oven,” she said.
“Yes, they will.” Sarah worked hard to hide her lack of enthusiasm. Barley cakes were uninspiring. And even what claimed to be barley flour probably had peas and beans ground up in it. They were easier to disguise there than they would have been with wheat, since barley rose less on its own than the more costly grain did.
Samuel Goldman came home with a tin can whose label had come off. “I found it in the gutter,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s not rusty. It’s not dented. It’s not bulging. Open it up and see what’s in it. If it smells all right, we can try it.” His mouth twisted. “Isn’t life grand, when we get to be guinea pigs?”
“With our luck, it’ll be beets, or maybe sauerkraut,” Hanna Goldman said.
“Just the same, it’ll be food we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” her husband replied. He smiled that lopsided smile again. “Always assuming we live through it, of course.” Even talking about scavenged canned goods, he sounded like a professor.
“I’ll get the can opener,” Sarah said. Before she used it, she washed the can and inspected it herself. Father was right-it looked fine. She let out a little yip even before she got the lid all the way off. “Chicken!” she exclaimed, as overjoyed as Lancelot might have been when he first beheld the Holy Grail.
Father picked up the can and sniffed it. He smiled and nodded. “Smells great,” he said. Sarah nodded, too-it did. Father handed Mother the can. “Why don’t you cook it on the stove?” he told her. “That will help kill anything bad that may be in there.”
“I’ll do it,” Mother answered, and reached for a frying pan.
“In America, I hear, they even put meat for dogs and cats in cans,” Father said. That was something to think about in a country where people were starting to eat dogs and cats. He went on, “If this were dog food, I think I’d eat it anyway. If I barked afterwards, I’d bark on a full stomach.”