He sighed now, and made a small production out of rolling a cigarette from dog-end tobacco and a scrap of newspaper. It was a big, fat cigarette; his butt-scrounging must have gone well on his shift in the labor gang. The match he scraped alight filled the kitchen with a nasty reek. A moment later, the smoldering newspaper and tobacco filled it with another one. He smiled as he inhaled all the same.
“We’re still here,” he said. “That puts us ahead of a lot of people.”
“Samuel!” Reproach filled Hanna Goldman’s voice.
“What?” Father said. Then he got it. He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sarah. Sorry for what happened, and sorry for reminding you of it like a shlemiel.” There was another bit of Yiddish with no exact German equivalent.
“It’s all right,” Sarah answered, which was at least approximately true. “Sometimes it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes … Sometimes it hardly feels like I was married at all. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. It’s one of the reasons I feel like a Goldman again.”
“You weren’t married very long, poor thing,” Mother said gently.
“And wartime marriages can be crazy things,” Father added. “I saw that the last time around. Some of the girls the men I fought with married … Well, the ones who lived fixed things afterwards. Or, a couple of times, they made it work when I didn’t think they had a prayer. You never can tell.” He blew smoke toward the ceiling and left things there.
How had he felt about her marrying a baker’s son? However he’d felt, he hadn’t said much. He must have realized he couldn’t do anything to change what she’d decided to do. When you couldn’t change something, keeping your mouth shut about it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
She thought she and Isidor would have been able to work through the rough spots life threw at them. They’d done pretty well in the little while they were together. But life threw more rough spots at Jews in Germany than ordinary married couples faced all over the rest of the world.
Come to that, life threw more rough spots at everyone in Germany than people in most of the world had to worry about: the RAF, for instance. Sarah had hoped the RAF would blow every Nazi in the Reich to the moon. When it killed her husband and in-laws instead … What was she supposed to think about it then?
She’d asked herself the same question ever since British bombs fell on the bakery. Now she asked it out loud.
Her father and mother looked at each other. Neither said anything for a little while. At last, Mother said, “They weren’t trying to kill the Brucks. They were trying to kill the Germans who were trying to kill them.”
“I know that,” Sarah replied with a touch of impatience. “If I didn’t, I would hate them.”
“During the last war, sometimes our guns would tear up the French farms and the like when we were going after their soldiers,” Father said slowly. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, not after the war got rolling. The farmers … just got in the way.”
“Like the Brucks?”
“Like the Brucks,” he agreed. “If you want to blame somebody, blame the people who started the war, not the ones who got stuck in the middle.”
He didn’t say who he thought had started the war. They still weren’t sure their house wasn’t wired for sound, even if the Gestapo had never given any sign it was listening. Sarah could draw her own conclusions. Yes, that Czech, that Jaroslaw Stribny, had assassinated Konrad Henlein. But it wasn’t as if Henlein, the Sudeten German leader, hadn’t been doing his best to tear Czechoslovakia to pieces.
Henlein wouldn’t have done that if it weren’t for Hitler and the German Nazis. He would have gone right on teaching gymnastics in his little provincial town. He probably still would have been a German nationalist. But, before 1933, nationalists had been a minority among Sudeten Germans. And, before 1933, they were a peaceful political movement, one of many peaceful political movements in a democratic country made up of a crazy quilt of different national groups.
After Hitler brought the Nazis to power, all that changed. Hitler heated the fire. Hitler stirred the pot and set it seething. Konrad Henlein paid with his life. Jaroslaw Stribny paid with his, too. The whole world paid with … how many millions of lives?
“Heil Hitler!” Sarah whispered.
Her parents looked at each other again. She wanted to clap her hands over her mouth. Neither of them had ever said that, not that she remembered, not even ironically or sarcastically. No, that wasn’t quite true. Father had, in jokes he told. But that felt different from this.
As if reading her mind, Father said, “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. We know what you mean.”
Mother nodded. “Oh, yes.”
Sarah started to cry. She’d done that all the time right after Isidor and his parents got killed, but she hadn’t for a while. Now all the pain flooded back at once. She felt ambushed; she hadn’t believed that could happen to her. Getting taken by surprise only made it worse.
When Mother put an arm around her, Sarah pushed her away and cried harder than ever. “Let her be,” Father said. “She’ll feel better once she gets it out of her system. Sometimes things come to a head, that’s all, and you have to lance them like a big old boil.”
While Sarah wept, she didn’t believe she’d ever feel better. Once she’d cried herself out, she found she did. This was an ordinary rough spot. The next night, the RAF bombed Munster again. Sarah hoped nothing fell on anyone who didn’t deserve it. Too much to hope for, she knew, but she did it anyway.
“You know something?” Vaclav Jezek said.
“I know all kinds of things,” Benjamin Halevy answered, which was certainly true enough. “Whether one of them is your something, though”-he shrugged-“that, I don’t know.”
“Right,” Vaclav said. “Y’know, sometimes you’re too fucking cute for your own good.”
“Jdi do prdele,” the Jew answered sweetly. “There. Is that plain enough for you?”
It meant something like Up your ass. It could be an invitation to fight, but not the way Halevy said it. “Same to you,” Jezek said. “Now where was I going before you derailed my train of thought? I can’t remember.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Halevy said.
This time, Vaclav came out with, “Jdi do prdele.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got it. Going on leave sucks-sucks hard.”
“We’re in the army,” Halevy pointed out, “or as much of an army as the Republic’s got-and that didn’t go to France. Everything sucks. That’s how armies are supposed to work.”
He almost always said interesting things. That one might keep Vaclav thinking for days. But it wasn’t what the Czech sniper wanted to talk about. “Going on leave sucks,” he repeated stubbornly. “When we get back to Madrid, all we can do is drink like pigs and screw whores.”
“What else would you want to do when you’re on leave?” Halevy asked reasonably. “What else is there?”
But Vaclav had an answer for him: “I want to go back to Prague, God damn it to hell. I want to see my family. Christ, I want to see if I’ve still got a family. I want to talk Czech with somebody besides this bunch of jerks.”
He waited. If Halevy laughed at him, he really might feel like brawling. But the corners of the Jew’s mouth turned down. “Oh, you poor bastard. You poor, sorry bastard,” he said, more sympathetically than Jezek would have imagined he could. “I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like you’ve got it bad.”
“ ’Fraid so,” Vaclav admitted. “I’ve been away too goddamn long. I’ve almost got my cock shot off too goddamn many times. And for years now the Nazis have been fucking the shit out of my country.”
It wasn’t Halevy’s country, or not exactly: not so much because Halevy’s parents were Jews, but because he’d been born in Paris. He spoke perfect Czech. He’d stayed with the government-in-exile’s forces when he could have bailed out of the war altogether. He might even have had better reasons to hate the Nazis than Vaclav did, and that wasn’t easy. But Czechoslovakia itself didn’t have the same hold on him as it did for the other men in this muddy stretch of entrenchments.