She and Isidor walked on. A lion slept in the corner of his cage. His head was twisted to one side, as if he were an enormous tabby cat. He seemed to sleep most of the time. At least, Sarah hadn't seen him awake in several visits to the zoo lately. Well, what else did he have to do, shut away behind bars?
As if picking that thought from her mind, Isidor said, "I know just how the lion feels."
"Me, too," she exclaimed, liking him better for that.
A giraffe stripped leaves from branches set on a bracket high up in its tall enclosure. Its jaws worked from side to side as it chewed. A camel stared at the humans with ugly disdain, then spat in their direction. "See?" Isidor said. "Even the camel knows we're Jews."
"Nah." Sarah shook her head. "It would have got us for sure if it did." They both laughed. Sometimes you couldn't help it.
People walked by carrying steins. A fat man (his saggy skin suggested he once might have been fatter yet) with a big white mustache sold beer from a handcart he pushed along in front of him. "Want one?" Isidor asked.
"I've love one," Sarah said. "But-" She didn't go on… or need to.
"He doesn't have 'I don't serve Jews!' plastered all over everything like a lot of the pigdogs," Isidor said. "Let's try it. What's the worst he can do? Tell us no, right?" He hurried over to the beer-seller. Sarah followed briskly. As if Isidor weren't wearing a yellow star, he told the man, "Two, please."
"Sorry, kid," the fellow said. "I'd like to. Honest to God, I would. My mother's father, he was one of your people. Sometimes the clowns at city hall, they give me a hard time about it-but only sometimes, on account of I just got the one grandfather. But if they was to think I wanted to be one myself…" He turned a thumb toward the ground, as if he were shouting for blood in a Roman amphitheater. (So Sarah thought about it, but her father taught, or had taught, ancient history. Isidor might have seen things differently, but he also couldn't miss the beer-seller's meaning.)
The baker's son sighed. "They'll come for you anyway, you know. They may come later, but they'll come."
"Oh, sure." The old man whuffled air out through his mustache. "But when you've got as many kilometers on you as I do, I figure it's about even money I crap out on my own before the bastards get around to it." He dipped his head to Sarah. "Sorry for the way I talk, miss."
"It's all right." She set her hand on Isidor's arm. It might have been-she thought it was-the first time she'd reached out to touch him, even innocently like that, instead of the other way around. "See? I said he wouldn't."
"Yeah, you did." Isidor touched the brim of his ratty cap in a mournful salute to the beer-seller. "Good luck."
"You, too." With a grunt, the fellow lifted the handcart's handles. The iron tires rattled on the slates as he shoved it down the path between the cages.
"Did you notice something?" Sarah said after he got out of earshot.
"I noticed he was a jerk," Isidor said, probably in lieu of something stronger. "What else was there to notice?"
"He wouldn't say 'Jew,'" Sarah answered. "His grandfather was 'one of you people.' He had 'just the one grandfather.' He didn't want to be 'one.' He knew what he didn't want to be, but he wouldn't say it."
"Ever since Hitler took over, I bet he's been going, 'Oh, no, not me. I ain't one of them,'" Isidor said. "By now, he may even believe it. Whether he does or not, he sure wants to." He scowled after the man. "And he's right, dammit. He may not last till they decide to land on him with both feet. We aren't so lucky."
"They've only landed on us with one foot so far," Sarah said. And maybe that was the worst thing of alclass="underline" she knew, or imagined she knew, how much worse things could get. WIND WHISTLED through the pines. It came out of the northwest, and it carried the chill of the ice with it. When winds brought blizzards to Japan in the winter, people said they came straight from Siberia. It wasn't winter yet-it was barely fall-but you could already feel how much worse things were going to get here. Sergeant Hideki Fujita was in Siberia. As he had in Mongolia farther west, he discovered that the winds just used this place to take a running start before they roared over the ocean and slammed into the Home Islands. They were already frigid by the time they got here.
"When will the snow start?" he asked another noncom, a fellow who'd served in northeastern Manchukuo for a long time.
"Tomorrow… The day after… Next week… Maybe next month, but that's pushing things," the other sergeant said. "Don't worry about it. When the snow does start, you'll know, all right."
"Hai, hai, hai," Fujita said impatiently. He looked north. "Miserable Russians'll cause even more trouble than they did when the weather was good-or as good as it gets around here, I mean."
"They're animals," the other sergeant replied with conviction. "Where they come from, they live with winters like this all the time. It's no wonder they're so hairy. Their beards help keep their faces from freezing off."
"I believe it," Fujita said. "I wanted to let my own whiskers grow when we were in Mongolia to try and keep my chin warm, but the company CO wouldn't let us do it. He said we had to stay neat and clean and represent the real Japan."
"Officers are like that," the other fellow agreed. "Shigata ga nai, neh? We grew beards along the Ussuri, I'll tell you. We tried, anyhow. Most of us couldn't raise good ones. It just looked like fungus on our faces. But this one guy-he had a pelt! We called him the Ainu because he was so hairy."
"Did he come from Hokkaido?" Fujita asked with interest. The natives the Japanese had largely supplanted lived on the northern island, though they'd once inhabited northern Honshu as well.
"No. That was the funny thing about it. Sakata came from Kyushu, way down in the south." The other noncom lit a cigarette, then offered Fujita the pack.
"Arigato." Fujita took one and leaned close for a light. Once he had the smoke going, he continued, "Maybe he had a gaijin in the woodpile, then. Isn't Nagasaki where the Portuguese and the Dutch used to come to trade?"
"I think so. He didn't look it, though. He wasn't pale like a fish belly, the way white men are, and he didn't have a big nose or anything. He was just hairier than anybody else I've seen-anybody Japanese, I mean."
"I understood you," Fujita said. Foreigners were big-nosed and hairy and pale-or even black!-which marked them off from the finer sort of people who lived in Japan. Oh, there were foreigners who didn't look too funny: Koreans and Chinese, for instance. But their habits set them apart from the Japanese. Koreans slathered garlic on anything that didn't move. Chinese were opium-smoking degenerates who were too stubborn to see that they needed Japanese rulers to bring sense and order to their immense, ramshackle country.
The wind blew harder. A few crows scudded south on its stream. High above them, a raven sported. Crows were businesslike birds, flying from here to there straight as airplanes. Ravens performed, gliding and diving and looping. Fujita liked crows better. But they were leaving, getting out while the getting was good. He wished he could do the same. If some kami touched him and gave him wings, he'd fly straight home. Unless a kindly kami touched him, he was stuck here.
"When do you think Vladivostok will fall?" the other sergeant asked, not quite out of the blue.
"It should be soon," Fujita answered. "All the news reports say the Russians can't hold out much longer. And we're sitting on their lifeline." If not for the Trans-Siberian Railway, this would have been the most worthless country anywhere.
"The news reports have been saying soon for a long time now. When does soon stop being soon?"
"It'll work out," Fujita said confidently. "The last time we fought the Russians, Port Arthur took a long time to fall, but it finally did."
"Well, that's true," the other noncom admitted. "I'd rather be here than trying to break into Vladivostok, too. They're fighting there like they fought in front of Port Arthur-with charges and trenches and machine guns everywhere."