La Martellita’s black eyes sparked. She was about to demonstrate dialectically why looks wouldn’t matter when true Communism arrived. Chaim didn’t feel like getting into a screaming row with her, which was what would happen if he presumed to doubt. Sometimes forearmed was forestalled. Instead of doubting, he said, “How about I take you somewhere for something to eat?”
He still spoke Spanish with the syntax of a New York Jew. Well, he damn well was a New York Jew. The locals could follow him, which was all that mattered when you were a damn furriner. La Martellita decided not to give him an ideological flaying after all. With a nod, she said, “We can do that.”
Soldiers didn’t make much. Neither did Party functionaries. But, unlike her, he gambled with what he did make. What else was he supposed to do with it? Sometimes the dice and cards ran your way for a while. He carried a good-sized wad of banknotes in a front pocket. Only a fool asking to meet a pickpocket carried his cash on his hip.
He pushed the buggy that held his son. He was proud to push it. He beamed when people looked inside and cooed at Carlos Federico. They did that more often here than they would have back in New York City. Whatever prosperity this poor, miserable world had left was concentrated in the place where he’d been born. Maybe that was why, like misers, so many New Yorkers hoarded friendliness as if it were gold.
Some of the Madrilenos gave him odd looks as they went by. He was used to that, and didn’t resent it … too much. It rarely happened when he walked through the city by himself. But when he was a homely guy with a gorgeous woman pushing a baby buggy that proved he’d got the gorgeous woman’s knickers down-oh, yes, he got the odd looks then.
And he would have bet dollars to dog-ends that he’d go right on getting them once true Communism came, assuming it ever did.
He sighed. He wished like anything he were still getting La Martellita’s knickers down. Wish for the moon, too, he thought mournfully.
She wasn’t married to him any more, which didn’t mean she’d given up on trying to improve him. “Don’t get into any brawls, all right?” she said as they walked into a cafe and wine shop not far from her block of flats.
“Who, me? ?El narigon loco?” He brought out the nickname with pride.
“Try,” La Martellita urged. Chaim gave forth with a resigned nod. Spaniards were allowed, even expected, to have a fiery temper. In a foreigner, it seemed an exotic affectation. In a foreigner who also chanced to be a Jew … Well, that was how he’d got the nickname.
He’d been in this joint before. La Martellita had been here a lot more often than he had. The waiter who showed them to their table-a guy with a limp and a gray mustache, which explained why he wasn’t at the front-bowed and scraped over her. You weren’t supposed to do that in the Republic, which was about radical egalitarianism if it was about anything. Maybe it was force of habit, more likely a tribute to La Martellita’s looks. She didn’t ream him out about it, but accepted it as no less than her due. Gorgeous people took such attentions for granted. They might, but Chaim sure didn’t.
He ordered paella for both of them. They drank white wine while they waited for the guy in the kitchen to work his magic. Carlos Federico started to fuss. La Martellita nursed him. Chaim gallantly looked away. He remembered those breasts too well. The little boy fell asleep. La Martellita gently set him back in the buggy.
“Pan is very hot,” the waiter warned as he set it down. Several crayfish sat atop the yellow rice. They were treyf on the hoof, of course, as if he cared. He sucked the meat and the juices out of their shells with as much gusto as if he’d been born in Madrid.
La Martellita sighed when she tasted the rice. “Turmeric,” she said, “not saffron.”
“What do you expect? There’s a war on, you know.” Chaim wasn’t inclined to fuss. Compared to the slop and the monkey meat he ate in the trenches, the paella was terrific, ersatz spices or not.
She gave him a severe look. “Things should be done properly. Rules are there for a reason.”
“If you say so.” He really was trying hard not to fight. He was a Marxist, even a Marxist-Leninist. She was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. It made a difference, all right. She liked telling other people what to do more than he did. He told her what to do anyhow: “Here. Have some more vino.”
She let him pour for her, but she said, “You won’t get me drunk enough to go to bed with you, either.”
“Who, me?” he replied, as if that were the farthest thing from his mind. He never would have got to sleep with her the first time if she hadn’t been gassed to the gills.
They scraped off the rice that had stuck to the iron pan. A lot of Spaniards thought that was the best part of the paella. Chaim didn’t, but it was miles from bad. He set money on the table. Bills over here were a lot fancier than boring American greenbacks. Greenbacks spent better than pesetas, though, even if they weren’t so pretty.
Was that also true of homely people. He thought about it while they walked back to La Martellita’s apartment. He’d had enough wine to make it seem important on the cosmic scale of things.
La Martellita had had enough to let him kiss her in the blackout darkness outside her building. But she slapped his hand away when he tried to slip it into her blouse and cup one of those perfect breasts. “No, I told you.”
A no from her meant no, not maybe or try again later. Swearing in several languages, Chaim mooched dejectedly back to the cafe and got very drunk.
Adi Stoss poured oil into the Panzer III. “This is better shit than they gave us when we first came to Russia,” he allowed, praising the lubricant with a very faint damn. “I don’t think it’ll turn to mucilage when the weather gets really cold.”
“The new and improved-again! — antifreeze won’t freeze up, either … I hope,” Hermann Witt more or less agreed.
“I hope so, too, Auntie Freeze,” Adi said sweetly.
Theo Hossbach bent down and scooped up enough snow for a snowball in his mittened hands. He delivered the editorial to the back of Adi’s neck, so that a lot of it slithered down inside the driver’s coveralls. Adi did an excellent impression of a man with ants in his pants.
A snowball fight was more fun than servicing the engine any old day. The whole crew joined in. They pelted one another with snow till their black panzer outfits might have been winter camouflage smocks. Theo also got a snowball smack in the snoot. Fortunately, whoever threw it hadn’t squeezed it down real tight. Otherwise, he might have needed to see the medics on account of some stupid horseplay. They wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would he.
Of course, the work didn’t go away just because you ignored it for a while. Theo greased the bow machine gun with lubricant that also promised not to turn to sludge when the mercury in thermometers froze solid (which, to any German’s horror, was known to happen during Russian winters). What the manufacturers’ promises were worth … Well, they’d all find out.
If Sergeant Witt was an optimist, he concealed it very well. “The bosses of the companies that make this junk, they’re back in the Reich, drinking champagne and stuffing their faces with roast goose and pinching the chambermaid’s ass.”
“They can kiss my ass,” Adi declared. “And the crap they sent us that first winter almost cooked our goose when it didn’t do what they promised.”
The panzer commander nodded. “They should come up to the front for a while. That would be an education for them, by Jesus!”