“Good. That’s good,” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko said. “In fact, very good. Ochen khorosho. ” He repeated the last two words with somber satisfaction as he stubbed out one papiros and lit another. He seemed to be one of those people who thought nicotine eased a pain in the hair-a term Sergei’d heard from a fellow flyer who’d served in Spain. It fit, all right. He’d smoked a couple of cigarettes himself, but just because he smoked, not because he thought they made much difference to his morning-afters.
Several flyers nodded. Even under Socialism, you couldn’t go far wrong agreeing with your squadron commander-and, more to the point, being seen to agree with him. Sergei only wished he could. But the newsreader had left too much out. He hadn’t said where the new borders were, for instance. That argued that Japan had seized more of southeastern Siberia than anyone cared to admit in public. The announcer hadn’t said anything about returning prisoners of war, either.
Maybe none of that mattered. With the Soviet Union officially able to concentrate on the west, Stalin probably planned to hang on here and renew the fight in the Far East when he saw the chance. He couldn’t let Japan hold on to Vladivostok… could he?
And what would Japan do now? She could put more soldiers into China. She plainly thought of the vast, disorderly country the way England thought of India: a place to exploit, with plenty of natives to do the hard work for her.
Come to think of it, Hitler thought of Russia that way. What else was he doing here but grabbing land and slaves? If he won this war, he would get his way. The thing to do, then, was make sure he didn’t.
Sergei took another swig of vodka-laced tea. His headache was backing off-some, anyhow. He couldn’t fight the Nazis now, not with the best will in the world. The rasputitsa made sure of that. It left him feeling more than commonly useless.
It was hard to remember, but across the sea lay a country where none of this mattered. The United States was the greatest capitalist nation in the world, and it was at peace with everybody. That struck Sergei as most unfair-all the more so when he was hung over. The Americans just sat there watching the rest of the world tear itself to pieces. As far as the pilot could tell, they didn’t care. Why should they? No matter who won, they got rich selling grain and guns.
Something should happen to them. It would serve them right, he thought. Then he laughed at himself. What could happen to the United States? The Americans had beaten their natives far more completely than the English had won in India or the Japanese in China. The Atlantic and Pacific shielded them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They even seemed immune to the inexorable working of the historical dialectic.
He brought himself up sharply. The Americans might seem immune, but they weren’t. Nobody was. The revolution would come to the United States, too. The big capitalists and exploiters would go to the wall, as they had in the USSR. It would happen in England and France, too-and in Germany, no matter what the Hitlerites thought or how little they liked it.
But when? The dialectic didn’t speak to that. For the USSR’s sake, Sergei hoped it would be soon.
Chapter 21
Some of the Russian prisoners at the camp south of Harbin were quick to learn bits of Japanese. They spoke without much grammar, but they made themselves understood. One skinny, hairy fellow bowed to get Hideki Fujita’s attention-they learned Japanese customs, too-and said, “Peace now Russia, Japan-yes, Sergeant- san?”
“Hai,” Fujita agreed. He couldn’t very well deny it, not when the peace had at last been officially announced.
“We go home?” the maruta asked.
To that, the Japanese sergeant only shrugged. “I have no orders one way or the other,” he answered. It was harder to think of the prisoners as logs when they became talking logs: not impossible, but harder.
“So sorry-don’t understand,” this Russian said.
“No orders,” Fujita repeated. They might be talking logs now, but no, they didn’t talk well. You had to keep things as simple as you could, as if you were talking to a retarded three-year-old.
The maruta got it this time. “Arigato,” he said. “When orders? Soon?”
Fujita shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said again, and walked away. He didn’t expect the orders the Russian wanted to come quickly, but he could see that admitting as much would only cause trouble. The Soviet government seemed to care about the men Japan had captured almost as little as the imperial government would have worried about Japanese prisoners. These Russians had lost Vladivostok, and so they were in disgrace.
It made perfect sense to Fujita. It made much more sense than most of the things the Russians did. It was, in fact, a very Japanese attitude. And if the Russians didn’t care what happened to their prisoners, how could anyone expect Japan to care? Simple: nobody could. And nobody did. The prisoners became maruta, became logs, and whatever happened to them was their hard luck.
Muttering, Fujita rubbed his arm and his backside. He’d had more shots since coming to Pingfan than ever in his life before. So it seemed now, anyhow. He was inoculated against everything from smallpox (they’d poked him again, even though he’d been vaccinated not too long before) to housemaid’s knee. Again, so it seemed to him.
But there were no inoculations against some of the diseases they used here. If you came down with the plague, odds were you would die. He’d never seen people so nervous about fleas as they were at this place. If you found one on yourself, you had to catch it and kill it and give it to one of the people from the inner compound so he could examine its guts under the microscope or whatever the devil they did in there.
Another maruta said, “Food? More food?”
That, Fujita could and did ignore. The prisoners got as much food as the officers in charge of such things said they should. He had nothing to do with it either way. If the officers wanted them plump and healthy, plump and healthy they would be. It happened. Sometimes the scientists needed to see what germs did to people who had nothing wrong with them but a particular disease. More often, though, the POWs went hungry, as POWs deserved to do.
“Why treat us like this?” yet another Russian asked. “Us people, too. What we do to you?”
How many Red Army soldiers had tried to kill Fujita? More than he could count-he was sure of that. But it wasn’t the point. Japan would have treated-did treat-Chinese prisoners the same way. And she would have treated other Japanese who surrendered to their enemies the same way, too. Thousands of years of history proved that, too. Soldiers who gave up weren’t people any more, not in the eyes of their captors they weren’t.
Could he explain that to a blond gaijin with shaggy cheeks? He not only couldn’t, he didn’t feel like wasting his time trying. He grudged the Russian two words: “You lost.” He felt the man’s pale eyes boring into him as he walked away, but so what? Those eyes only further separated the prisoner from him. They should have belonged to a cat, not to a human being.
A few days later, some of the white-coated men from the inner sanctum came forth. They needed fifty Russians to test something or other they’d developed. And, of course, they needed guards to make sure none of the Russians got unruly or got away. A lieutenant, a sergeant, ten ordinary soldiers… Fujita was the sergeant.
“What do we do, sir?” he asked the lieutenant-a chunky man named Ozawa-who’d been at Pingfan when he got there.