“They’re brave. They’re Fascist pishers, but they’re brave.” Chaim admired the courage of the Spaniards on both sides. As far as he was concerned, they carried it to, and sometimes past, the point of insanity.
But Votslav, a military pragmatist, only shrugged. “A fat lot of good it does them. They wouldn’t be so easy to kill if they didn’t parade around like a bunch of dumbheads left over from Napoleon’s time.”
It wasn’t the first time Chaim had heard a European talking about Napoleonic tactics when he meant something old and outdated. The guys from the Abe Lincoln Battalion who thought about history (some cared no more about it than Henry Ford did) spoke of the Civil War the same way.
The other Civil War, Chaim reminded himself. A redheaded guy in a new-looking tunic with Czech’s sergeant’s pips came up to them in the trench. He spoke to Votslav in Czech, but Chaim needed no more than the blink of an eye to realize what he was. “Vos macht a Yid?” Chaim said.
And the other fellow needed only a moment to size Chaim up. “You’d know the mamaloshen, all right,” he said. “Who are you? Where are you from?”
“I’m Chaim Weinberg, out of New York City. You?”
“Benjamin Halevy. Paris. My folks came from Prague, so I grew up with a bunch of different languages. I was liaison for the free Czechs till Daladier decided to turn into Hitler’s tukhus-lekher. Now I’m here.” His wave didn’t get higher than the parapet-the Nationalists would have snipers, too. “The verkakte Garden of Eden, right?”
“ Verkakte is right, anyway.” Chaim didn’t need to look around to know how abused the landscape was.
“Go slow,” Votslav said. “I have trouble keeping up when you guys jabber like that. It’s not the German I learned in school.”
“Bet your putz it’s not, buddy,” Chaim said, not without pride. Benjamin Halevy chuckled. The real Czech only sighed and scratched his head. Both he and Halevy wore Adrian helmets. They covered less of the head than the ones the Spanish army issued. Chaim liked them better even so. Spanish helmets looked too much like the German Stahlhelms they were modeled on. He didn’t like looking like a Nazi storm trooper-no way, nohow. He sometimes did it; he’d seen too many men dead from a piddly little fragment that happened to pierce their skull to want to avoid that if he had any chance at all. Nothing could make him happy about it.
Halevy waved again, this time toward Sanjurjo’s lines. “Jezek’s right-those guys aren’t such hot stuff. We ought to advance and clean ’em out.”
Was I that eager when I first got here? Chaim supposed he had been. He was still willing. He wouldn’t have stood in this chilly trench if he weren’t. But he doubted he’d ever be eager again. He said, “The French must have been feeding you a lot of raw meat.”
Benjamin Halevy’s crooked smile was all Jew. “Because we’re new here, we think everything’s easy, you mean?”
“Yup.” That was English-of a sort. Halevy and-Jezek, was it?-understood anyhow.
“Maybe this is true. And maybe we have reason for it.” The Czech soldier’s German could be awkward, but it worked. It was a hell of a lot better than Chaim’s Spanish. Jezek explained, “Now that we cannot shoot Nazis any more, we have to make do with people who get into bed with Nazis.”
“People who dance the mattress polka with Nazis,” Halevy amended. Chaim grinned. The Yiddish phrase had more bounce than the polite German, both literally and figuratively.
Thinking about dancing the mattress polka naturally made him think about La Martellita. He’d got what he wanted from her, all right. And he’d also got much more than he’d bargained for when he first jumped on her shikker bones. She didn’t want to see an abortionist. Even under the Republic’s liberal laws, they were illegal, which didn’t mean business ever went bad for them, here or anywhere else.
That she didn’t want to find one had surprised Chaim. La Martellita seemed such a perfect Red, somebody who wouldn’t think twice about something like that. Maybe taking the girl out of the Catholic Church was easier than taking the Catholic Church out of the girl. Heaven knew that was true about plenty of Jews who converted to Christianity.
So now things were official. The civil ceremony took a minute and a half-two minutes, tops. He didn’t feel particularly married afterwards. Married or not, he hadn’t been anywhere close to sure his brand-new bride would let him touch her again. That, in fact, was an understatement. He’d wondered if she would plug him as soon as the “I do”s were over. A widow could give a baby a legitimate last name, too.
But no. He really must have pleased her the second time they made love together, when she’d let him touch her after he tenderly battled her hangover. And so he got one night’s worth of honeymoon back at her cramped flat. It would have been just his luck to have a Nationalist air raid interrupt things at some critical moment. But, again, no.
And, again, he worked hard to please her. Despite that second time, when they started as man and wife she looked ready to spit in his eye and tell him he was the lousiest fuck in the history of fucking. Had she kept that attitude after they turned out the lights, he would have begun with three, maybe four, strikes against him.
One more time, though, no. She seemed to decide that, as long as she was going to do this, she might as well do it right. When she did it right, she did it up brown. She was no blushing virgin bride-anything but. Some of the things she did without being asked might have surprised a pro. They sure surprised Chaim, not that he complained.
Afterwards, his heart still thundering, he blurted, “When I can see again, I’ll try to tell you how marvelous that was.”
“You are… as good as I remember,” La Martellita answered-tepid praise compared to his, but better than he’d hoped for. She added, “Get off me now. You’re squashing me flat.”
“Lo siento.” And Chaim had been sorry. He hadn’t wanted to do anything to ruin this. And, some time in the not very indefinite future, he’d looked forward to another round, and then, with luck, one more after that.
Dancing the mattress polka… He smiled, there in the trench. One of these days before too long, he’d get another furlough. And then he’d hurry back to Madrid, hurry back to his new wife. If he had only not quite nine months of marriage ahead of him here, he aimed to make the most of them.
Julius Lemp hated winter patrols. A U-boat would roll in a spilled glass of water. When the seas were high and the wind howled down from the north, he feared the U-30 would capsize. That wasn’t likely; U-boats were designed for these conditions. But the sour stink of puke never left the boat when she tossed and capered like a badly spooked pony.
He’d hoped things would be better in the Baltic’s close confines than in the North Sea or the wide, wild winter waters of the North Atlantic west of the British Isles. And things were… better. That only illuminated the vast gap between better and good.
Some of the waves the harsh winds stirred up here were big enough to send deluges of frigid seawater down the hatch at the top of the conning tower and into the U-30. Besides drenching the sailors, the water shorted out electrical equipment, gave the pumps a workout, and even threatened the massive batteries that powered the U-boat’s electric motors while she was submerged.
“If we stayed at Schnorkel depth, skipper, we wouldn’t have to put up with this,” Gerhard Beilharz said up on the conning tower, water dripping from his oilskin cape and headgear.
“Maybe,” Lemp answered. “But maybe not, too. When we’re running seas like this, what are the odds a big wave-or a bunch of big waves, one after another-would make the Schnorkel ’s safety valve shut? And then how long would the diesels take to suck all the fresh air out of the pressure hull? Or, if the valve didn’t work, water would come down the pipe and flood the engines, and then we’d really be screwed.”