“Either he didn’t get the one he was aiming at or the fellow had a buddy with him,” Father said.
“Who was doing the shooting?” she asked.
“Somebody. Anybody.” Samuel Goldman shrugged. “They didn’t even want me back as an ordinary soldier, let alone for the General Staff.” Another shrug. “Ah, well. I’ve never worn trousers with red Lampassen, and I guess I’m too old to start now.” The strip of scarlet cloth along the outer seam of the trouser legs marked a General Staff officer’s uniform.
“Too bad. I bet you’d do a better job than some of the fools who are wearing them,” Sarah said.
“For one thing, you’re wrong. To get on the General Staff, you have to know what you’re doing,” Father answered. “For another, even if you were right, what would I accomplish? I’d win victories for the Führer, that’s all.”
He didn’t say anything like And every Jew in Germany needs that like a hole in the head. He didn’t have to. Sarah could fill in the blanks for herself. “Well, you’re right,” she admitted. “You know what worries me?”
“No, but since you’re going to tell me that doesn’t matter so much, either,” he said.
She made a face at him. Then she did tell him: “If they can’t make people here feel like traitors, they’re liable to try to make them feel like anti-Semites. If they’re shouting ‘The Jews are our misfortune!’, they won’t worry so much about shouting ‘Down with the Nazis!’ ”
“It could be. The Nazis always play that card, or they do when they think of it,” Father said. “And you want to remember that Cardinal von Galen complained about what Himmler’s flunkies were doing to the feebleminded. He didn’t say a word-not one single, solitary word-about what they were doing to us.”
“Us?” Sarah said in some surprise. He never rejected his Jewishness, but he rarely made a point of it like that. He wanted to be a German, even though the Nazis didn’t want to let him.
But he nodded now. “Us,” he said again. “I’m not going to deny it. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t very well deny it.” He touched the Star of David sewn onto the lapel of his threadbare tweed jacket.
There were more gunshots, these closer. Someone sprinted down the blacked-out street in front of the house. A minute later, several more people ran past after him. By the clump of their footfalls, they were wearing boots. That made them either soldiers or SS men.
I hope he gets away, Sarah thought. She didn’t say that out loud. Except for the odd gunshot or odd fugitive sprinting by, it was eerily quiet. No telling how far a voice might carry.
“Never a dull moment,” Father said dryly.
“I guess not,” Sarah said.
Mother came in from the kitchen, where she’d been pickling cabbage. Sauerkraut would keep for a long time. It wasn’t exciting, but it put food in your belly. Hanna Goldman clucked. “If anyone had told me a year ago I’d keep working while people were shooting off guns, I would have said he was crazy.”
“You get used to anything. You get used to everything,” Father said. “If people didn’t get used to dreadful things, they couldn’t have wars. You step on one mangled body, it’s the most horrible thing that happened in your whole life. You step on three or four mangled bodies while you’re walking to the field kitchen, you turn to your friend and go ‘That last shelling smacked us pretty good, didn’t it?’ ”
“That’s-terrible,” Mother said, which was exactly what Sarah was thinking.
“It is. I know it is. But you have to, or you do go crazy,” Father replied. “A few men couldn’t, and they did go meshuggeh.” He smiled at the Yiddish word, but quickly sobered again. “The first time you shoot at somebody and the first time you know you hit somebody-those are bad, too. After you do it for a while, though, you just think Well, all right, I got that one. Now he won’t get me or any of my buddies.”
“No wonder you never talk much about what you did in the war,” Sarah said.
“No wonder at all,” Father agreed. “Back before the Nazis took over, I’d go the the Bierstube with some of the other Frontschweine. We’d talk about things amongst ourselves. Why not? We understood-we were the only ones who did. But they got nervous about drinking with a Jew, and who could blame them? Besides, a lot of them are back in Feldgrau these days.”
“You would have gone. You tried to go, only the fools who run things wouldn’t let you. I was thinking about that a little while ago,” Sarah said. “Why would anybody want to do that twice?”
“That’s the wrong question, dear,” her mother said. “The right question is, why would anybody want to do that once?”
“You will never have a closer comrade than the man who saved your neck during a trench raid.” Father seemed to think he was explaining something. If he was, it was something that only made sense-that could only make sense-to someone else who’d been through what he had.
Sarah’s reflections were interrupted when another rifle shot rang out. A bullet spanged off the bricks of the front wall a split second later. “Gevalt!” Mother said. Sarah couldn’t have put it better herself.
“Hel-lo!” Father said. He wasn’t horrified. On the contrary-he looked and sounded extremely alert. He also looked as if he wished he had a Mauser in his hands. The laborer, the professor, even the Jew dropped away, leaving only the old Frontschwein.
Whoever had the Schmeisser fired back in a long, stuttering burst. Then the rifle spoke again. Somebody let out a horrible shriek. It went on and on. Sarah wanted to stick her index fingers in her ears to blot it out. You weren’t supposed to hear noises like that. Human beings weren’t supposed to make noises like that.
Father bit his lip. He would have heard such cries before. He would have a better idea than Sarah about what would have to happen to somebody to force such cries from his throat.
After a while, the shriek became something more like a gurgle. Then silence fell again. “Poor devil,” Father said. “Believe it or not, I wouldn’t wish that on even an SS man. Well, he’s not worrying about anything now.” He began to roll another cigarette.
CHAPTER 12
“Keep in good order, you lunkheads!” Arno Baatz shouted as the men he led got into the train. They were lucky-this was a passenger car, even if it was one with hard seats. They wouldn’t have to sprawl on the floor of a freight car that stank of horseshit from its previous occupants.
For once, the Landsers didn’t grumble at him. One of them said, “Back to the Vaterland!” He might have been announcing miracles. They’d been fighting the Ivans for a long time. Being sent back to Germany probably felt like a miracle to them. It felt like something of a miracle to Baatz.
It was also a source of pride. “They figured we were reliable enough to help them clean out a nest of traitors,” the Unteroffizier said importantly. “Our regiment, our company, our squad. We’re not going to let them down, are we? Not when they’re counting on us, we’re not!”
He scowled at Adam Pfaff. The Obergefreiter looked back with an expression surely more innocent than the man who owned it. If Pfaff had thought he could get away with it, he would have sassed Arno about answering his own question. But he was cunning and sneaky enough to see he couldn’t get away with it. So he acted all meek and mild instead.
He can’t fool me, though, Baatz thought. Given half a chance, Pfaff turned into a barrack lawyer or a shirker. He was good enough against the Ivans. Even Baatz couldn’t deny that. Politically reliable, though? Not likely! Not even a little bit likely.
Muttering, Arno took his own seat. His ass would be petrified by the time they got back to the Reich. No help for it, though, not unless he wanted to clamber up to the luggage rack about the windows and pretend to be a haversack all the way west.