“What are you going to do about it?” Jezek asked. Halevy might be a Jew with parents from Prague, but he thought of himself as a Frenchman. He’d been proud to think of himself as a Frenchman till his government hopped into the sack with the Nazis.
That, though, must have been the last straw, because he answered, “What am I going to do? This.” He crumpled the letter into a ball. “And this.” He flipped it up and over the earthen parapet in front of the trench.
A split second later, a rifle shot rang out from the Nationalist lines. A bullet thudded into the dirt in front of them. “Hel-lo!” Vaclav said. “They’ve got a sniper over there keeping an eye on us, to hell with me if they don’t.” Sometimes you’d fire at any motion you saw and worry later about what it might be.
Halevy didn’t care about that. He knew better than to stick his head up where anybody on the other side might see it. And he managed to strike a silent-movie pose without putting himself in danger. “Here you see me, a man without a country!” he said in melodramatic tones.
“Big fucking deal.” Altogether undramatic, Vaclav fumbled in his tunic pocket for his cigarettes. As he lit one, he went on, “About a division’s worth of men without a country within mortar range of where we’re at.”
By some standards, he and the other Czechs in the line here were men without a country themselves. The Germans sat on two-thirds of what had been Czechoslovakia. Father Tiso ruled the Slovaks in the remaining third as a Fascist dictator-and as a Fascist puppet. The Czechoslovakian government-in-exile insisted that would all be put right one day. Jezek had to hope it was right. The Germans and Poles and Magyars and suchlike in the International Brigades had even less reason for optimism, and less of a chance of ever seeing their homelands again.
“I know, I know.” Halevy pointed to the pack. “Give me one of those?”
Vaclav did. “You’re a scrounge without a country, is what you are,” he said. “Plenty of those within mortar range of here, too.” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t bummed plenty of butts off the Jew.
After lighting up, Halevy said, “All of us guys without a country, we should get together and make our own new one. Hell, we could conquer a province somewhere-a lot of us carry guns, right?”
“Sounds great,” Vaclav said. “We could fight some big old wars against our neighbors, whoever our neighbors turn out to be. And if that ever gets boring, we can have civil wars about which language we should speak or whether we should raise taxes or not.”
“I like it.” Halevy clapped his hands together. “We’re not even a country yet, and already we’ve got big-time things to fight about.”
“Oh, hell, yes. Nothing but first class for us.” Vaclav sent him a sly look. “Good thing we’ll have some Jews to kick around.”
“Jews are the original people without a country,” Halevy said seriously. “Hard to be a number-one country without ’em. I mean, look at Germany. How much fun could the Nazis have if they just went and persecuted Gypsies and queers and Czechs and no-account folks like that?”
“Oh, I expect they’d manage.” Vaclav sounded as dry as his cosmopolitan comrade usually did.
Halevy grunted. “Mm, you’ve got something there. The Nazis are a cancer on humanity. They’ll eat up whatever they’re next to. Unless surgery works, they’ll eat up the whole world.”
Cancer. Surgery. Vaclav had heard a lot of nasty talk about the Nazis, but none that made more sense to him. “You’ve got a way with words, you know that?” he said, genuine admiration in his voice.
“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t think you cared,” Halevy lisped, and blew him a kiss. The Jew was as grimy and bestubbled and smelly as any other soldier who’d stayed in the front line too goddamn long. When he swished that way, he caught Vaclav by surprise and reduced him to helpless laughter.
“You son of a bitch!” the Czech wheezed when he could talk at all.
“Well, at least you smiled when you said it,” Halevy replied. The other Czechs were gaping at them as if they were both nuts. I guess we are, Vaclav thought, not without pride.
Chapter 11
Hideki Fujita rolled off the comfort woman, stood by the side of the bed, and pulled up his trousers. The rules at military brothels didn’t let him take them off, or even his boots. All that dressing and undressing wasted time. The comfort women wouldn’t have been able to service so many horny soldiers.
As he fastened his belt, he said, “Arigato.”
The comfort woman just stared at him. She stared through him, really: her eyes were a million kilometers away. She was Burmese-a couple of shades darker than a Japanese would have been, with less angular features. She looked as different to him as an Italian would have to an Englishman. That he looked as different to her as an Englishman would have to an Italian never crossed his mind.
Somebody banged on the door to the humid little room. “Hurry up in there!” the man outside yelled in Japanese.
Out went Fujita. As he’d hoped, the man standing in the hallway was only a corporal. “What was that?” he growled.
“Please excuse my bad manners, Sergeant-san.” The lower-ranking noncom quailed, as he had to. Fujita could have mashed him like a yam without getting into trouble. Superiors could always do what they wanted to inferiors-that was how the Japanese system worked.
Sated, though, Fujita didn’t feel like fighting now. He walked down the hall to the stairs. Behind him, the Burmese girl’s door slammed shut. The corporal would get his sloppy seconds, just as he’d got someone else’s a few minutes before. When you thought of things like that, wasn’t it something close to a miracle that the whole Japanese Army hadn’t come down with one venereal disease or another-or with one venereal disease and another?
Locals and Japanese soldiers led oxen up and down Myitkyina’s streets. Some of the oxen had sacks of grain strapped to their backs. Some pulled two-wheeled carts or four-wheeled wagons. None of them moved very fast. Trucks were few and far between in Burma. Nothing seemed urgent here, the way it had on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia, in Siberia, and in Unit 731 south of Harbin.
One of the fighting fronts was off in the west, by the border between Burma and India. The other was up north, in southern China. Myitkyina was a long way from either of them. If not for the bacteriological-warfare unit outside of town, this would have been a complete backwater.
Once upon a time, when he was younger and more eager, the way things went here would have bothered Fujita. No, it would have done worse than that-it would have driven him crazy. Not any more. Rushing toward an attack-what did that really mean? It meant rushing toward a chance to get killed: nothing else. Living was better, if they gave you even half a chance. You could do better than laying these resigned Burmese women, but you could also do an awful lot worse.
Not far from the brothel was the hotel the English Army had used for a headquarters till the Japanese chased out the white men and took over the place for themselves. It was the best Myitkyina boasted, which wasn’t saying much. A third-rate colonial copy of a third-rate English provincial hotel … Fujita didn’t know the details. All he knew was, the place was a dump.
But it was a dump with a bar, so he walked in anyhow. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the battered lobby. They stirred the air without doing much to cool it. The bar was all dark wood and brass. The kind of place it was modeled on might have felt cozy and inviting back in England. Here in Burma, the bar seemed out of place, to say nothing of bewildered.
They had beer. Fujita had never been in a bar anywhere that didn’t have beer. They had sake-a bad local imitation of what the Japanese made. And, no doubt because they’d started life as a bad copy of an English hotel, they had what they called whiskey. That was a worse local imitation of what the English made. It smelled and tasted like kerosene, and felt like burning kerosene on the way down. Once, Fujita had asked the native behind the bar what it was distilled from. The man had seemed fluent enough in Japanese, but he suddenly lost his ability to understand the language.