Adam Pfaff brought it closer yet: “Those are Russian panzers.”
Willi nodded glumly. For one thing, they were coming out of the east, where the Wehrmacht had no panzers. For another, the Ivans’ diesels sounded different from the gasoline engines his own country used. To Willi, they sounded more sinister, more evil, but he would have admitted he was prejudiced.
Awful Arno’s face was a study. He wanted to deny that there were panzers in the neighborhood. If he couldn’t do that, he wanted to deny that they belonged to the Red Army. If he couldn’t even do that … Well, no wonder his ugly, overfed mug was a study.
He yelled for the radioman. That worthy couldn’t come quickly, not with his set and the batteries that powered it in a heavy pack on his back. Awful Arno wasn’t just yelling by the time he did arrive. The underofficer was screaming: “Get us an 88! Schnell! Call the regiment! Call the division! Call your granny if you want to-I don’t care who you call! It doesn’t matter if you pull that 88 out of your asshole! Just get it here! On the double!”
Pfaff giggled helplessly. Willi found himself doing the same thing. He was much too likely to get killed in the next few minutes, but here he was, laughing like a fool. If you had to go, he supposed there were worse ways. He didn’t want to go, but he was unpleasantly aware he might not get a choice.
Well, there was always a choice. You could run away. But it wasn’t much of a choice, not here, not now. No guarantee the T-34s wouldn’t catch up with you anyway. No guarantee the guys on your own side wouldn’t shoot you in the back for bolting. And the certain sour knowledge that you’d be letting your buddies down. That carried more weight than either of the others.
The radioman gabbled into his microphone or telephone or whatever the hell you called it. He fiddled with the set-switching frequencies? Then he talked some more, louder and more urgently.
Willi didn’t hang around to find out how that particular story wound up. He ran for his foxhole. The Ivans had learned better than to send panzers forward without infantry support (so had the Wehrmacht). He couldn’t do much against thirty tonnes of steel with a scope-sighted Mauser. But he could make the luckless ground-pounders who slogged along with the Russian panzers good and miserable.
Horizons and landscapes in Russia seemed ridiculously wide. They did if you’d grown up in the more confined spaces of Western Europe, anyhow. There were the T-34s: tiny as mice at the moment, but getting bigger all the time as they clattered forward. And those little bugs scuttling along between them and behind them, those bugs were the Red Army foot soldiers from the slings and arrows and grenades and Molotov cocktails of outrageous Landsers.
They didn’t look like bugs through his scope’s crosshairs. They were men then, by God-men in the almost-Swiss-pattern helmets the Russians stamped out, men carrying rifles that might not be quite so good as his but that were plenty good enough for most murderous purposes. If he didn’t do for them, they would damn well do for him. Even if he did do for some of them, the rest-or those panzers-might finish him all the same.
He fired. One of the Ivans spun and toppled. He was proud of himself. Even with a sniper rifle, he couldn’t hit out past a kilometer every time. Nope, not even close, especially on a moving target. But there was one Red Army man who wouldn’t come any farther forward.
Not far away, a mortar team opened up with their 81mm stovepipe. The Germans had started the war with a smaller, shorter-ranged mortar. Seeing how useful this caliber was to the Red Army made Wehrmacht designers imitate it. Why don’t they do that with the goddamn T-34? Willi wondered.
The mortar team got lucky. One of their bombs came down right on top of an advancing Russian panzer. The big machine went up in a spectacular display of fireworks. The crew couldn’t have had any idea of what hit them. There were plenty of worse ways to go. Willi’d seen too many of them, and hoped not to meet any of them in person.
He also hoped the explosion would make the other panzer crews think the 88 was here. It could kill them from farther away than they could reach it. No such luck, though. The Ivans came on. Pretty soon, they stopped, but only so they could shell the Germans in front of them. They didn’t shoot especially well, not by German standards. Splinters whistled past Willi. They shot too well to suit him.
Hauled by a half-track, an 88 arrived in the nick of time, like the cavalry in an American Western. The comparison fit, not least because the Germans called their foes Indians. The Ivans fought like savages, that was for sure. Willi didn’t even know the gun was behind him till it blasted two T-34s in quick succession.
The surviving enemy panzers turned their fire on the 88. If they could smash it or kill its crew before it got done murdering them … In that case, this movie wouldn’t have the happy ending the director and the screenwriters should have come up with.
Willi popped up out of his hole like a jack-in-the-box, squeezing off shots at the oncoming Russian foot soldiers. As with his first round, some he was sure he hit. Some who went down might have been diving for cover after bullets cracked close to them. You might not want to miss, but you did when you were short on time to aim.
Up he popped again. He got an Ivan in his sights. And another Ivan got him. A Stahlhelm stopped splinters. A rifle round? Not a chance. He knew an instant’s surprise, nothing more. Yes, there were worse ways to go, not that he knew anything about that any more, either.
Sarah had gone to a lot of trouble remembering to sign her married name. She’d written Goldman only a couple of times after Isidor put the ring on her finger. Bruck flowed from her pen, at first with a mental discipline her father would have admired and then, as she got used to it, more naturally.
Officially, Bruck she remained. Without Isidor beside her, though, without his parents, without the bakery (and, thanks to the Nazis, without whatever the bakery had been worth), she didn’t feel like a Bruck any more. She was back with her own parents, having nowhere else to go. Didn’t that turn her into a Goldman again?
“If you want to think so, then it does-for you,” her father said when she asked him about it.
“You’ll always be our baby, no matter what you call yourself,” Mother added, which helped and didn’t help at the same time.
Samuel Goldman went on, “Even if you’re Sarah Goldman in your head, you’d better stay Sarah Bruck on paper. If you turn into somebody else, what will happen? Some Party functionary at the Rathaus who can’t count to eleven without taking off his shoes will wonder what’s going on. Is a dirty Jew trying to pull a fast one? You don’t need that kind of tsuris.”
He dropped the Yiddish word into his professorial German the way he might have used a Greek or Latin terminus technicus into a lecture when he was still allowed to teach at the university. He used it for the same reasons he would have trotted out the classical languages, too: because it said something with no precise German equivalent, and to show the world he knew such things.
“More tsuris I need like a hole in the head. I’ve got plenty already,” Sarah agreed. Father rarely used Yiddish. He looked down on it-it was the jargon Ostjuden spoke. Jews from Eastern Europe, with their beards and caftans and long dresses, had seemed as alien to him on German soil as they did to his Aryan neighbors. He’d hoped their odd look and habits were what fueled the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. He’d hoped … in vain. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews, and that was the long and short of it.