She’d been in Czechoslovakia when the Germans invaded it, going on six years ago now. She didn’t think they deserved to keep any of it. They’d started doing horrible things to the Jews there as soon as they invaded, and as far as she knew they hadn’t stopped since. They didn’t exactly give the Czechs a great big kiss, either. As for Slovakia, the thugs running it were a pack of cheap imitation Nazis. One of them was a priest, but he still acted like a cheap imitation Nazi.
Of course, what she thought the Germans deserved had nothing to do with the price of beer. Great-power diplomacy was what it was, not what you wished it would be. As Douglas Edwards had pointed out, in 1938 England and France let Germany swallow Austria and were ready to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. Hitler attacked it without even giving them the chance. The world hadn’t seen peace since.
When Chamberlain and Daladier went to Munich to try to talk Hitler into letting them hand him the Sudetenland on a plate instead of running into the kitchen and grabbing it himself, Czechoslovakia’s diplomats hadn’t even been allowed in the room. They’d had to sit and wait while foreigners decided their country’s future.
Would anybody pay attention now to what the Czechs wanted? Peggy tried to hope so. Try as she would, she had trouble bringing it off. England and France hadn’t been eager to fight over Czechoslovakia to begin with. They’d done it, but with no great enthusiasm. They still had none for the war. Hitler had shown himself to be full of deadly dangerous ambition. If General Guderian and his friends didn’t want to lie down with the lamb and get up with lamb chops, the European democracies would deal with them.
By the same token, no one outside the area was likely to get excited about which country the people in and around Wilno wanted to belong to. No, the question was, who got to have it? Right this minute, Stalin looked like the odds-on favorite. For that matter, who outside the Baltic region would notice or care if the USSR quietly gobbled up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? They’d belonged to the Russian Empire for a long time.
The Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians liked independence? They didn’t want to belong to the Soviet Union? What had Chamberlain called the 1938 Czechoslovakian crisis? A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. Yes, that was it. And that was how almost the whole world would feel about this quarrel, too.
After Peggy finished the crossword puzzle, she fixed herself a stiff bourbon on the rocks. She didn’t usually start off so early-that was for lushes. But she’d gone and thought herself sad. As long as you didn’t drink yourself blind, bourbon made a pretty good medicine for that.
Anastas Mouradian was trying to explain the current status of the war to Isa Mogamedov. “Suppose you have a cat in a box, a box where you can’t see or hear anything inside,” he told his copilot.
“I have a cat, da.” Mogamedov nodded agreeably. “Is it a good Soviet kitty or a nasty, hissing, biting Fascist fleabag?”
“Bear with me. Suppose you want to find out whether the cat in the box is alive or dead.”
“You open the box,” Mogamedov said.
“Suppose you want to find out without opening the box, though.”
“Can you smell inside, to find out whether the cat is shitting or rotting?”
“Not that, either.”
“Well, how do you tell, then?” the Azeri asked with the air of a man humoring a lunatic.
“I’ve thought a lot about it, and the way it looks to me is, you can’t tell till you open the box and you see whether a live cat jumps out or something’s in there stinking that you’ve got to chuck on the rubbish pile. Till then, you just don’t know. As far as you’re concerned, the cat is alive and dead at the same time … until you open the box and see,” Stas said.
Mogamedov muttered a few words in Azeri. Stas didn’t understand them, but the tone left something to be desired. Then Mogamedov switched back to Russian: “And this has what, exactly, to do with the war?”
“Well, mostly that we don’t know what will happen-we have no way of knowing-till either it happens or it doesn’t,” Mouradian answered. “Maybe we’ll go back to bombing the Fritzes and they’ll go back to trying to shoot us down. Or maybe it will be peace, and we start figuring out what to do with our lives from then on. In the meantime, though, the war is alive, but it’s dead, too.”
What he said made sense to him-a peculiar kind of sense, but sense even so. Whether it made even a peculiar kind of sense to anyone else … he was about to find out. If Mogamedov laughed in his face, he thought he really would have to look for another crewmate, no matter if putting in the request meant a black mark on his record.
The Azeri looked as if he were about to laugh. Then he stopped looking that way. Quite visibly, he thought it over. After a minute or so, he said, “Well, you’re not as crazy as I thought you were when you first came out with it. Or I don’t think you are, anyhow.”
“Thanks,” Stas said. “I know it’s loopy, but it’s interesting to play with in your head, too, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Mogamedov nodded “Not a dead war, not a live war … That’s what we’ve got, all right.”
He must have liked the conceit well enough to pass it along to other flyers and groundcrew men. Pretty soon, people all over the air base were talking about “Mouradian’s cat.” Isa hadn’t stolen the credit for it. Or he might have decided he wanted to stick Stas with the blame.
That was another one of those cases where you couldn’t know the answer till after you asked the question. You might not know even then. When you opened the imaginary box, a live cat either would or wouldn’t hop out. A dead cat couldn’t lie about being alive. But Isa Mogamedov could lie.
Stas didn’t give him the chance. He didn’t ask.
Some of the Red Air Force men teased him about “Mouradian’s cat.” A few seemed interested in the paradox. He was more proud than otherwise to have his name attached to something people were talking about.
He was for a little while, anyhow. Fighting men being what they were, they didn’t talk about “Mouradian’s cat” for long. Pretty soon, they started going on about “Mouradian’s pussy.” That might have been funny once-to him. To a lot of the guys, it got funnier every time they said it.
“Hey, Stas,” another lieutenant called at supper, “how’s your pussy?”
“Well, Volodya, why don’t you step outside the tent here, and I’ll show it to you,” Mouradian answered calmly.
Everyone whooped as they strode out together. Half a minute later, Stas came back in. He sat down and returned to the kasha and mutton in his mess tin. Some of the knuckles on his left hand were skinned. His right ankle was sore from kicking Vladimir Ostrogorsky in the belly so hard, but that didn’t show.
When the Russian didn’t come back in right away, a couple of men went out to see what had happened to him. They came back staring at Stas. “Bozehmoi, Mouradian,” one of them said. “Volodya won’t ask about your pussy again any time soon.”
“That was the idea,” Stas answered, and returned to his supper without another word.
He did wonder how many friends Lieutenant Ostrogorsky had, and whether they’d try to pay him back. He dared hope they wouldn’t. Ostrogorsky had been asking for it. Anybody could see that. Well, Stas hoped anybody could see it.
At last, Ostrogorsky did walk in. By the shaky way he moved, he might have downed a liter of vodka. His eyes didn’t quite track, either. He had a bruise on the side of his jaw; a trickle of blood ran down his chin from one corner of his mouth.