“The Ivans are as busy in the turret as a one-armed paperhanger with the hives any which way,” Adi said. “The guy who commands the panzer handles the gun, too. That prick had to know his business if he could kill one of our machines single-handed.”
Theo nodded. The driver’s thought closely paralleled his own. That Russian-or Armenian, or Azeri, or Kazakh, or Karelian, or whatever the hell he was-needed killing exactly because he knew his business. And because he would have smashed this panzer like a cockroach if it hadn’t got him first.
“Good job, everybody,” Witt said. “Panzers are just like fucking, y’know? You don’t have to have the biggest one around. Knowing what to do with what you’ve got counts for more.”
That was good for several minutes’ worth of filthy banter. The panzer commander must have known it would be. And letting it out relieved the tension of nearly stopping one of the T-34’s big rounds-and big they were.
After the chatter died away, Adi turned to Theo and said, “Catharsis.” Theo nodded again. He must have raised an eyebrow, too; that wasn’t a word you heard every day, no matter how well it fit here. Looking slightly shamefaced, Adi said, “My old man taught ancient history and classics for a while.”
As far as Theo could remember, that was the first time Adi’d ever said anything at all about his family. As far as Theo’d known, the driver might have been born, or possibly manufactured, in a replacement depot. Some kind of response seemed called for. “Is that a fact?” Theo ventured.
“Too right, it is,” Adi answered ruefully. “He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, too, the way a father will.” Acid tinged his laugh. “Tell me, man-do I look cut out to do ancient Greek?”
He looked cut out to be a blacksmith or a professional footballer or a soldier. He wasn’t stupid-nowhere close. But he had instinctive excellence with his body, not with his head. Things must have worked the other way for his father. Carefully, Theo asked, “What does he think of you being here?”
“He was at the front last time.” Now Adi sounded proud. “Wounded, too. Walked with a limp as long as I can remember. Sometimes this is the best place to be.”
“Could be,” Theo allowed. Considering some of the other places where Adi might have been, he was bound to have that one right. Theo did something unusual then-he asked another question: “What’s he doing these days?”
“Street labor.” Adi made a face, as if regretting he’d opened up as much as he had. He pointed a blunt, grimy forefinger with dirt and grease under the nail (a finger a lot like Theo’s, in other words) at his crewmate. “That’s for you to know, understand? Not for blabbing. Too goddamn much blabbing in this outfit.” He looked very fierce.
“I don’t blab,” Theo said, which was such an obvious truth that Adi not only nodded but even chuckled. As long as Theo was running his mouth, he decided to run it a little more: “If there was too much blabbing here, you’d’ve been gone a long time ago.”
“Huh.” Perhaps to give himself a chance to think, Adi lit a cigarette. He offered Theo the pack. Theo took one with a grunt of thanks, then leaned across the radio so the driver could give him a light. Adi blew a long stream of smoke out through his hatch. “Keep your mouth shut about that one anyway, you hear? It makes things kind of obvious.”
Theo nodded. There was only one likely reason for a scholar of classics and ancient history to end up in a labor gang. Oh, Adi’s father might have been a Communist. He might have been a queer-but, since he had a strapping son, he damn well wasn’t. No, what he was was … probably lucky to be alive at all. Well, so is Adi, and so am I, Theo thought, and tapped ash off the end of his coffin nail.
Chapter 10
The politruk was haranguing the company. Ivan Kuchkov wished he could turn off his ears. He didn’t need political indoctrination to understand that he was supposed to kill as many Germans as he could. The fuckers would sure do for him if he didn’t kill them. Or, if he tried to bug out, the Chekists would take care of the job instead.
You couldn’t win. Sooner or later, somebody’s fragment or bullet would have your name on it. (Kuchkov could neither read nor write, but he understood what people were talking about when they said things like that.)
“Now is the time to press on to victory!” Lieutenant Maxim Zabelin shouted. “Even the degenerate bourgeois capitalists of the West have finally realized that the Fascist jackals are beyond the pale. The Hitlerites will be pressed from both directions, smashed like bugs between two boards!”
Even if you’re right, so what? Ivan thought. One thing he’d found out over the years was that being right mattered a lot less than most people thought it did. The Nazis were still here, deep in the Ukraine, only a long piss away from Kiev. They could still shoot your dick off-and they damn well would, if you gave them half a chance. Or maybe even if you didn’t.
“Attack! Attack fiercely! Never a step away from the enemy! Never even a single step of retreat!” the politruk said. “Do you understand me, bold soldiers of the Red Army?”
“Da!” the men chorused. Kuchkov joined in. Somebody would be watching. You didn’t want to get tagged as a shirker, even if you were. Especially if you were, and he was, every chance he got.
“Questions?” Zabelin asked.
Now Kuchkov kept his big mouth shut. You didn’t have to ask questions. You took a chance every time you did. They didn’t care what you knew. They didn’t want you to know anything but what they told you. And if you let them know you wanted to find out more than that, or you already knew more or knew better, they wouldn’t pat you on the back and tell you what a clever fellow you were. Oh, no. They’d figure they couldn’t trust you, and they’d give you one in the neck first chance they got.
Kuchkov knew such things instinctively, the way he knew he breathed air and drank water (or vodka, whenever he could get it). He never failed to be amazed that men better educated than he was, men by all accounts smarter than he was, didn’t get it. Almost every time the politruk asked for questions, he found some suckers who came out with them.
Sure as hell, a soldier raised his hand now. “Comrade Political Officer, are the English and the French still class enemies of the Soviet state now that they’re fighting the Hitlerites again?”
“What a clever question, Sergei!” Maxim Zabelin beamed at the soldier, the way a village butcher would beam at a fat sheep. “Yes, of course they are. The revolution of the workers and peasants will find a home in those lands, too. This shows the inevitability of the historical dialectic.”
The company commander ambled over. First Lieutenant Obolensky puffed on a papiros while he listened to the politruk’s blather. He outranked the other man, which meant exactly nothing. The politruk had the Party behind him. He could countermand the company commander’s orders whenever he felt like it. If he said Obolensky was ideologically unsound, his alleged superior would find himself in the gulag or a penal battalion, and would no doubt spend the short rest of his life wondering what the devil he’d done to deserve that.
A couple of other fools asked questions, too. The politruk handled them with the effortless ease of a circus performer going through an act for the thousandth time. He was also bound to be noticing who they were and what they wanted to know. If he didn’t fancy the questions, or the questioners, the dumb dickheads would wind up unhappy pretty damn quick.
As usual, the politruk’s meeting closed with a shout of “We serve the Soviet Union!” When the men went off to do what they should have been doing instead of listening to him, the political officer aimed a sloppy salute at the company CO and said, “All yours, Comrade Lieutenant.”