He sighed now. His breath smoked. Winter could get very respectably cold on the plateaus of central Spain. “I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t buy a ticket at the train station and just go,” he said.
“Don’t I know it!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I can’t even write to anybody back there. It’s like all of Central Europe is a hole in the map.”
“Have you tried writing through the Red Cross in Switzerland?” Halevy asked. “I don’t know for sure, but they might be able to get letters back and forth. Censored and all, sure, but still.”
“Huh!” Jezek said in surprise. “You know, I never thought of that.”
“Like I said, I don’t know-I haven’t had to worry about it,” Benjamin Halevy said. “But if you try and you don’t get an answer back, how are you worse off?”
There was another good question. Vaclav had to scrounge paper and a pencil off the Jew. He scribbled a note to his father. None of the Czechs had an envelope, let alone a Republican stamp. He got those from Chaim Weinberg, the American International whose Yiddish he could more or less follow.
“I write to my folks every now and then, so I’ve got that kind of shit,” Weinberg explained. “My old man thinks I’m meshiggeh for being here, but so what? We’re still family, y’know?”
“He thinks you’re what?” Vaclav’s German wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t know that word, or even if it was German.
“Some people say meshuggeh.” Weinberg tried to be helpful, but didn’t succeed. Then he spun his right forefinger by his right ear.
“Oh.” Vaclav got that, all right. He sometimes thought the Americans was nuts, too, though for reasons no doubt different from the ones Weinberg’s father had.
He addressed the envelope in care of the International Red Cross in Geneva and sent it off. He had no idea whether the Red Cross would answer him or his folks would or nobody would. He was inclined to bet on the last. But, as Halevy said, how was he worse off if that happened?
He did get a card from the Red Cross-the first mail he’d had since he couldn’t remember when. It was printed in German (which he could read) and French and English (which he couldn’t). The German said We are attempting delivery of your letter. We cannot guarantee acceptance. Presumably, the message in the other languages was the same.
In the meantime, the fighting ground on. The war in Spain was going on seven years old now. By all the signs, it might last forever. The Republicans advanced bit by bit. They’d gain a couple of kilometers. A Fascist counterattack three days later would throw them back one and a half. They’d regroup and push another thousand meters north and west. Sanjurjo’s men would recapture half of that.
Almost every morning before dawn, Vaclav would sling his antitank rifle, crawl out into no-man’s-land, find somewhere to hide, and wait to see what kind of bastards in yellowish khaki he could pot. His work was so regular, he felt as if he ought to punch a time clock when he went out and came back.
He felt proud of himself when he blew the head off another German officer trying to teach the Nationalists how to fight more like the Wehrmacht: shoveling shit against the tide, in other words. He almost pitied the German as he pulled the trigger. That didn’t stop him from killing the man, but did leave him thoughtful.
Spaniards were brave. No way around that. Both Spanish Republican troops and their Nationalist foes attacked and defended with a ferocity Vaclav admired and didn’t want to imitate. But attacks went in late. They didn’t always go in where they were supposed to. Artillery support was haphazard at best, and sometimes didn’t come at all.
Vaclav had fought the Wehrmacht. Czechoslovakia had built its armed forces on the German model, of which it had far more experience than people here did. Men in Feldgrau didn’t fuck up the way the Spaniards did. They were human, sure. They goofed. But their besetting sins were different, and didn’t include sloppiness. If that bastard from the Legion Kondor hadn’t gone out and got smashed every night … Well, he’d never have the chance now.
Whenever Vaclav punctuated someone more than usually prominent, he threw Marshal Sanjurjo’s side into a tizzy. The Nationalists started shooting off machine guns and letting fly with mortars and banging away with their 77mm guns and 105s. None of the Fascist hate came anywhere near him. No one in the enemy trenches must have spied his muzzle flash. That was nice. He might even get another shot from this hiding place.
And he did, toward afternoon, at a fat Spaniard who had to be at least a colonel. To his vast disgust, he missed. The Spaniard dove for the deck; he didn’t topple bonelessly, the way he would have if that muscular bullet had pulled the plug on his drain. You couldn’t win them all. Jezek got pissed off whenever he didn’t, though.
This time, the enemy machine guns probed more accurately. He flattened himself against the dirt as the rounds cracked past not far enough overhead. It would get dark pretty soon, but not nearly soon enough to suit him.
After the sun went down, a Czech picket almost shot him when he didn’t come out with the day’s word fast enough. Factory workers sometimes went through tough days, too. They had shorter hours and better pay, though, and most of them weren’t lousy. Vaclav dropped down into the trenches and lit a cigarette.
When Anastas Mouradian exhaled, his breath puffed out in a big white cloud. He’d been in colder places. In Siberia, this would have been a mild winter’s day. In Siberia, it could get cold enough that the water in your breath instantly turned to ice crystals when you let it out. It made a noise when it did: the whispers of stars, they called it there.
Stas had never heard the whisper of stars. He’d heard enough different people talk about it to believe it was real, though. This wasn’t anywhere near that cold. But it was cold enough to freeze the ground so planes could fly again. The fall rasputitsa was over.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky explained the mission in the simplest possible terms: “We’re going to knock the Fascist hyenas’ cocks off. If they want to fuck around with the Rodina, we’ll make the cunts pay.” Even Mouradian, for whom Russian was a second language, knew a mixed metaphor when he heard one regardless of whether it was laced with mat. A composition teacher would have left angry red scrawls all over the squadron commander’s paper.
Real life didn’t grade things the same way. The assembled flyers-most of them Russians-laughed and whooped. One or two of them pumped their fists in the air. Mat had started out as the slang of hoodlums and lowlifes. The camps and the war were like wicks through which it soaked into the wider Russian world.
“Seriously, though,” Tomashevsky went on, “the Hitlerites are getting new tanks that are giving our boys grief. If we blast the stuffing out of the railroad lines and the train stations, the tanks’ll have a tougher time coming forward. So that’s what we’ll do.”
He stabbed at a map on a folding stand with a pointer. “Bobruisk today,” he said. One corner of his mouth twisted upwards. “A different bombardment unit has been given the honor of heroically attacking the railroad yards at Minsk.”
Stas didn’t let out a big sigh of relief, but several flyers did. Minsk lay farther west than Bobruisk, which meant a longer flight over German-occupied territory. Minsk was a bigger, more important place, too. The flak above it would be fiercer. The Pe-2s would be more likely to meet up with Messerschmitts over Minsk.