Heading home, she went around the checkpoint where the soldiers had handled the merchandise. She realized she took the same kind of chance at every checkpoint she came to. Maybe the new troops she met would be even worse. But maybe they would leave her alone.
“Why are you out?” asked a sergeant she’d never seen before after he inspected her identity documents.
“I needed some aspirins.” She showed him the bottle.
He made a thoughtful noise halfway between a cluck and a grunt. “All right. Münster’s a headache for everybody, I guess. But go on home now, and stay there till you really need to come out.”
“Thanks,” she said in glad surprise.
“You’re welcome,” he answered. Then he spoiled it by adding, “Heil Hitler!”
Or did that spoil it? Sarah wondered as she hurried away. He’d just been decent to a Jew, or as decent as a German soldier was likely to get. Wouldn’t he need to give his men a signal that he remained loyal to the regime and that what he’d done didn’t mean anything?
The harder you looked at things, the more complicated they got. Her father had said as much. But he was talking about things like how closely the speeches in Thucydides matched what the speakers really said or why Brutus joined the plot against Julius Caesar. If it was true everywhere, what did that mean?
What is truth? Pilate asked. It was a good question in New Testament days, and it remained a good question now. Truth was something like whatever remained after you looked at a question from every angle you could.
Sometimes, of course, nothing was left after you did that. Hitler’s speeches sounded splendid, but he hardly ever said anything but I want it because I want it. A three-year-old would have got his bottom warmed for that. The Führer got thousands of people yelling Sieg heil!
Sarah wondered what would have happened if the war had gone the way Hitler wanted, if Paris had fallen in the early days of 1939. Would people here be up in arms against him now? She didn’t think so. England would have made peace then-what choice would she have had? And the German flag might be flying over the Kremlin right this minute.
As things were … As things were, she made it through the rest of the checkpoints without getting groped again. She supposed it was a triumph of sorts. When you were out of sorts, though, you wished for bigger triumphs than that.
“I hope it wasn’t too much trouble,” her mother said when she got home.
“It could have been worse,” Sarah said. If it could have been better, too, she didn’t spell that out.
She also didn’t need to. “Oh, dear,” Hanna Goldman said. “Maybe I should have gone myself. They wouldn’t have bothered me.”
“I’ll live.” Sarah suspected her father would tell her it was only soldiers being soldiers, which was to say, men being men. The really scary thing was, that might well be true. Men could get annoying enough any time if they thought you were attractive. Men with rifles at hand, she was discovering, could be worse. How were you supposed to say no if one of them insisted that you say yes?
But when Samuel Goldman came home, he was excited about other things than man’s inhumanity to woman. He pulled a tinfoil tube out of one of the inside pockets of his jacket. “Look at that! Will you look at that?” he exclaimed. “It’s half full-more than half full-of butter! Butter! Can you believe it? A soldier just threw it away, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And if he could afford to throw butter out, he didn’t. When’s the last time we saw any?”
“Before the war,” Sarah said. “Has to be.” They’d cut Jews’ rations sooner and harder than those of Aryans.
“I thought so, too,” Father agreed. “With this”-he tapped the tube with his finger-“we could fry some eggs if we only had some eggs.”
“Maybe a soldier will throw them away,” Mother said. Father looked so wounded, she backtracked: “Well, I’m glad you got it any which way. It will taste good on bread, and we have got some bread.”
Samuel Goldman seemed happier. “I don’t think even the Party Bonzen get butter very often any more. And the soldiers throw out cigarettes they’ve hardly smoked, too. They’ve got it soft in the Army.” He paused. “People would have said the same thing about us in 1918. But soldiers helped make the Kaiser leave.” His eyes twinkled. “We can hope, anyhow.”
CHAPTER 16
So this was what victory looked like. Vaclav Jezek had never seen it before, not in all the days since the Czechoslovakian Army conscripted him. He’d lost in his homeland, fought to a draw in France but then had to leave when the politics shifted under his feet, and now he’d spent a good long stretch in the trenches here in Spain.
No more. The war, what was left of it, was out in the open now. Here and there, the Nationalists would try to make a stand, but regiments seemed to distrust the men on either side of them even more than they hated the Republic. As often as not, they would surrender, especially when they saw they were facing foreign troops and not their vengeful countrymen.
Vaclav was glad when it was easy. He was especially glad when he didn’t have to do a lot of marching. Carrying upwards of ten kilos of antitank rifle in the trenches was one thing. He could take it off his shoulder or his back a lot of the time. When he sneaked out into no-man’s-land, he was down on all fours or on his belly. Tramping along with it from sunup to sundown he could have done without.
Benjamin Halévy watched a section of Nationalists stack their arms after giving up. The Czechs searched them, more to get rid of holdout weapons than in hopes of loot. The Spaniards were a poor and raggedy lot. They had nothing worth stealing, not any more.
“Poor bastards. They don’t know what they’re getting into,” Halévy remarked. “The Republicans will send them to reeducation camps, and who knows how many will come out, or when?”
“They would’ve been just as nasty if they’d won, or even worse,” Vaclav said.
The scrawny, dirty, shaggy Nationalist prisoners nudged one another. “Russos,” one of them said, pointing to Jezek and Halévy.
Even with his rudimentary Spanish, Vaclav got that. “They think we’re Russians,” he said, laughing.
“Czech has to sound as foreign to them as Spanish does to you,” Halévy answered. He didn’t say to us. He was fluent in Czech, French, and German, and could manage Catalan, Spanish, and Yiddish-and maybe other tongues, too, for all Vaclav knew.
Off the prisoners went, hands clasped on top of their heads. When they got to the rear, Republican Spaniards would take charge of them. Then their fun would really start, as Halévy had said. But the Republicans weren’t-for the most part-killing prisoners out of hand these days. Both sides had done too much of that. They meant it when they said they hated each other.
Vaclav hated Fascists and Fascism. He rather liked Spaniards. They were so different from people he’d known before he got here, they fascinated him. They sometimes drove him crazy, too, but he suspected that worked both ways.
As the Czechs started marching again, he said, “Remember how some of our guys went back to France again after the alliance against Stalin fell apart?”
“I’m not likely to forget,” Halévy replied. “The French Army tried to recall me, too, you know.”
“I was thinking, now that this war’s pretty much won, I’d like to get up there and give the Nazis some more.”
“I wouldn’t mind so much, either,” the Jew said. “Chances are I could tell them I never got their stupid recall letter.”
“Would they believe that?” Vaclav asked.
“I doubt it. But they couldn’t prove I was lying. That would be enough to keep them off my back,” Halévy said. He touched the lieutenant’s badge painted on his helmet. “I’d have to get used to being a sergeant again. My own country won’t let me stay an officer-God forbid!”